ORNL's Newest Petaflop Climate Computer To Come Online For NOAA

bricko writes with a description of NOAA's Gaea supercomputer, being assembled at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory. It's some big iron: 1.1 petaflops, based on 16-core Interlagos chips from AMD, and built by Cray. "The system, which is used for climate modeling and resource, also includes two separate Lustre parallel file systems 'that handle data sets that rank among the world's largest,' ORNL said. 'NOAA research partners access the system remotely through speedy wide area connections. Two 10-gigabit (billion bit) lambdas, or optical waves, pass data to NOAA's national research network through peering points at Atlanta and Chicago.'"

Comments

Re:The fuck we need this for?

[ackthpt]

5-day forecasts are quite accurate. Check for probabilities, and if they're low, check back in a few days. I've been rarely surprised by weather in the last few years - as in, was expecting a warm, sunny day and got instead cold rain all day.

Depends where you live. Right off the Pacific Ocean a prediction is only good for about a day, sometimes not even that. All depends how directly a cell is moving relative to you position. Finding temperature and direction of ocean currents has a bit to say on the matters and doesn't necessarily move in a 2 Dimensional plane.

Living in the midwest, ah, you could see it coming days away. Very predictable over large land area.