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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?
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/
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.
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
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... --
Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.
However, due to the processing power required by Windows Authorized Edition (AE), JRE 25.0, and the GPU cycles required to render clippie in holographic hi-res, it will still take about a second between a menu-click and anything useful happening... (RMSLinux, however, will still run on old 486 SX machines...)
Your grandkids' PC will be made out of room temperature superconductors. The "CPU" will be a single chip containing a lattice of 1048576 10 Ghz processors. It will incorporate a quantum co-processor, qubit level hyperthreading, and 1024 Etabytes extratemporal random access storage.
Great! Just in time for Duke Nukem Forever!
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