NASA Upgrades Weather Research Supercomputer

Cowards Anonymous writes "NASA's Center for Computational Sciences is nearly tripling the performance of a supercomputer it uses to simulate Earth's climate and weather, and our planet's relationship with the Sun. NASA is deploying a 67-teraflop machine that takes advantage of IBM's iDataPlex servers, new rack-mount products originally developed to serve heavily trafficked social networking sites."

Comments

Well how long?

[the eric conspiracy]

Does this mean that the forecasting simulation for tomorrow's weather will run in less than 24 hours?

Open models are imperative

[EmbeddedJanitor]

These are the models predicting Global Warming etc. These need to be open to peer review due to the significant impact of getting these models wrong.

Faster does not mean better. I'd rather have less iterations per day on a good model than many of a crap model.

Re:Big Question:

[bunratty]

As you may expect, making climate models more accurate is a big topic of climate research these days. You can read about the basics of climate models at Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_climate_model

Re:Other Big Question: Is this NASA's job?

[khallow]

From the National Aeronautics and Space Act (which authorizes NASA and its activities):

(d) The aeronautical and space activities of the United States shall be conducted so as to contribute materially to one or more of the following objectives:

(1)The expansion of human knowledge of the Earth and of phenomena in the atmosphere and space;

(4)The establishment of long-range studies of the potential benefits to be gained from, the opportunities for, and the problems involved in the utilization of aeronautical and space activities for peaceful and scientific purposes;

(5) The preservation of the role of the United States as a leader in aeronautical and space science and technology and in the application thereof to the conduct of peaceful activities within and outside the atmosphere;

Re:Big Question:

[toby34a]

You know, a lot of the climate and weather prediction models are open source. You can download the source code if you want, and run it on your own PC if you have certain compilers. Some links for you for your own perusal: Community Climate Model NASA GISS Model Weather Research and Forecasting Model Regional Atmospheric Modeling System As long as you have access to a Linux/Unix machine, you can get these models yourself. If you want to contribute, you can do so. Just know that you probably need to have taken graduate level courses in numerical methods and actually get the physical terms in the model to make changes that mean something. Science in this case is rather open. People can easily download these models and make changes to improve it if they needed to (or to test sensitivity, etc).