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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.'"
How much a Petaflop Climate Super Computers contribute to carbon footprint...
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
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.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It's disheartening that most of the first posters are all trolls wondering why we would ever need this or are just trying to get cheap jabs in on a site for nerds. If you don't like the science behind it (climate sciences), or you don't like the technology behind it (computing systems), then why come here to comment?
Personally, I don't put much stock in the climate modeling capabilities of it just because that is not my area of study or interest. But having another large supercomputer with interconnects running at this speed is pretty cool.
I've worked at a company that had 8 of these 10Gb waves worth of bandwidth between Chicago and NY (and at an extremely low latency), now THAT was fun! On the other hand, the prisms and optics you need in order to separate out the lightwaves were hideously expensive :)
- Toast
And we still can't accurately say where the next hurricane will make landfall in 3 days, or if I'm going to get rained on tomorrow.
Von Neumann apparently envisioned a world where computer scientists were like high priests, because he thought automated computation would allow us to control almost everything and predict what we couldn't control.
He couldn't imagine that there would be things so entirely resistant to prediction and control, and since for some reason he believed that the universe cared two pins for what he or anyone else could or could not imagine he concluded that no such processes could exist.
He didn't know about deterministic chaos, which turns out to be quite common, no matter how hard it is to imagine.
Weather forecasting is one such area where deterministic chaos reigns. Economic forecasting is another. Climate forecasting is may or may not be: wait a few hundred years and we'll see. There was a belief in the late '80's that the solar system was chaotic, but that turned out to be due to imperfections in our numerical models, which should be a cautionary tale for anyone wanting to drive policy from science that passes through climate models, although since limiting fossil fuel usage is such an obviously beneficial move to everyone outside the fossil industries it's not as if being skeptical about climate models is going to change any honest person's mind about environmental policy.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
Interesting bit about the solar system and chaos. As far as open-access papers, this seems like an interesting overview, though it's about a decade old now.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Of course it's going up, NASA has confirmed that with satellite information as well as several other sources all showing quite clearly that the temperature is rising.
News flash: the satellite and surface station temperature records closely agree.
Basing models on data that is at least 1/3 bogus is fucking stupid
News flash: "data that shows cooling" != "bogus data". Parts of the Earth do cool from time to time, you know (and are expected to, even with the enhanced greenhouse effect). The satellite data shows this as well.
NOAA puts a LOT of weight on the land-based temperature data in their models.
Climate models usually don't use temperature data at all (i.e., it's not an input to the model). They're run freely using only the forcing data (greenhouse gases, solar varations, aerosol loadings, etc.) and allowed to predict their own temperatures, without reference to any temperature observations.
When they are initialized with temperature data (in "data assimilation" mode), land gets exactly the weight it should: about 30% of the Earth's surface.
Temperature observations are used for testing the predictions of climate models, but the above remains true: land data gets exactly as much weight as its area average. And models are compared to a variety of temperature records (surface and satellite), not that it matters much, since (as noted above), they all agree pretty closely.
I would like nothing more than accurate climate models but we'll never get them until people admit that the data we have is shit.
As amply demonstrated above, you have no idea what you're talking about.
A cluster of stations within a 50 mile radius at about 2/3 warming and 1/3 cooling.
Again, so what? This does not imply there is anything wrong with the data. You are deeply confused about what should happen, meteorologically speaking, on microclimatic scales.