Slashdot Mirror
Nerd Vacation to the Earth Simulator
eecue writes "Earlier this year I went on vacation to japan. At the end of my trip I was lucky enough to receive a tour of the Earth Simulator, which is the world's fastest super computer. I took pictures and wrote about it."
I wonder if we can slashdot the worlds fastest supercomputer? ;-)
I wonder how far in advance things like, say, the climate can be predicted, even by such a powerful computer. It's almost impossible to predict the weather for even a small area (I live in the Netherlands) for more than the coming few days to a week, because it's so sensitive to small errors. (That doesn't mean I'm not impressed by the thing, of course.)
If they are going to simulate the earth...then of course as part of the earth, they will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)...which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1) which will have to simulate the EARTH SIMULATOR(3) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(2) simulating the EARTH SIMULATOR(1)..etc.etc.etc...and of course that must go on indefinitely! Dont they have better things to spend millions of dollars of processing power on?
The article mentions that "They were afraid to mention on their website that they offered tours as there were only 3 english speaking employees of the lab". Now this hits Slashdot. Guess they may as well mention it on their site now, since it's already now known in the world of the rabid technophile.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
Now I changed the password to the final 84 digits of pi. See ya suckers!
Looks like it's been #1 since at least June of last year.
http://www.top500.org/list/2002/06/
muhahaha ..
wait, who slashdots themselves ?
what's a little bandwidth cost in the hopes of looking worldly & possibly attracting the attention of a g33k girl =) mmmmm
- tensions in our lives that are attacking our minds, unite themselves together to make our consciousness blind - op'ivy
So if you are in Japan and you are as nerdy as me, email me and I will give you her contact address.
For the majority of people here, this would be the first female entry in their email client's contact list!
Man is she in for a bad time!
Code, Hardware, stuff like that.
Pls. Don't tell anybody that we geeks travel around the world to look at computers,
If any none nerds find out ! it just confirms the general believe that we are all a group
Of sad persons with no life
I just hate bit SPAM, (www.netnoise.com.kh)
I've read in various articles that supercomputer weather prediction systems look at around 200,000 points on the earth surface. With the points being a few km apart. When you think about the size of the earth, this is a very fine grid. However, when you think about a specific person, the spacing is hugh. Hence the problem with weather prediction. A few km can mean the difference between a downpour in a city, or completely missing it.
most people should start with a visit at the LIFE simulator
Fleur de Sel
This is the fundamental obstacle to simulation of natural phenomena. However, while local parameters remain hard or impossible to predict, global parameters are easier to forecast, and computing power helps. This is where supercomputers come in: for example, they help us study the effect of global warming far out into the future.
Many ships record information for the meteorlogical services, but the trouble is that only works where there are ships. In some of the meteorologically interesting places such as the poles are often shrouded in clouds and have few weather stations.
The truth is that many points must be interpolated. Points closest to civilisation are quite good because there are enough measuring stations. This means that short-term weather forecasts are quite good (except in the UK, where they may be right but delayed or advanced by up to a day) but deteriorates over about three days and over a week or so is extremely difficult.
Forget the calculations, if you don't have data points, you are just speculating.
See my journal, I write things there
No-one can be told what the Earth Simulator is. You have to see it for yourself.
As far as the command set goes it's a vector processor. That means it has an instruction set that is completely unlike any standard scalar (Von Neumann) archictecture processor you may be familiar with. The CRAY series of supercomputers were one of the first vector processors around; do a google search for "CRAY Instruction Set Reference Card" and have a look. That will give you some insight on how a vector processor is programmed. Most instructions support 3 operands - 2 source and a destination argument.
-- You are in a maze of little, twisty passages, all different... --
Unfortunately they may have to pass you up.
Just curious. It seems that NASA computers that launched Apollo were amazing at the time - the cream of the crop - yet we have far surpassed that computing power, speed, storage in even laptops 30 or 40 years later.
I can't wait to see my grandkids' pc!
Any sufficiently well-organized Government is indistinguishable from bullshit.
There's a big difference between weather forcasting and climate forcasting.
If we begin with the assumption that the digits of Pi are completely random, then the following analysis is much simpler and much more correct (or it had better be now that I said it was) than the one presented:
The probability of finding a particular single digit is 0.1, or of finding a particular sequence of two digits is 0.01 or 0.1^2. The probability of finding a particular sequence of n digits is 0.1^n.
Therefore, the expectation is that on average you will find a particular sequence of n digits once every 1/(0.1^n) digits, or 10^n digits.
The question then arises as to the efficiency of indexing this many digits to locate the sequence desired. The amount of storage required for the index is log base 10 (log_10) of the number of digits you need to look. If we assume the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits, then the amount of storage required for the index is:
log_10 (10^n) = n (log_10 (10)) = n
Unfortunately, the assumption I slipped in above that the desired sequence will always occur in average or less digits only holds 50% of the time. Therefore, in order to have a good chance of finding the sequence, we need to include a longer search space, and thus the index needs to be just slightly more digits in length than the sequence being stored.
In essence, a very effective data expansion algorithm.
(Proofreading is left as an exercise for the reader.)