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Climate Change Research Gets Petascale Supercomputer
dcblogs writes "The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) has begun has begun using a 1.5 petaflop IBM system, called Yellowstone. For NCAR researchers it is an enormous leap in compute capability — a roughly 30x improvement over its existing 77 teraflop supercomputer. Yellowstone is capable of 1.5 quadrillion calculations per second using 72,288 Intel Xeon cores. The supercomputer gives researchers new capabilities. They can run more experiments with increased complexity and at a higher resolution. This new system may be able to reduce resolution to as much as 10 km (6.2 miles), giving scientists the ability to examine climate impacts in greater detail. Increase complexity allows researchers to add more conditions to their models, such as methane gas released from thawing tundra on polar sea ice. NCAR believes it is the world's most powerful computer dedicated to geosciences."
Hey look, when we model the city where the machine is, there's a hot spot. What could be causing it?
For those who serve it will surely oppress your very existence.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those?
That won't be science, it will be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
All this computer power is going to climate study/prediction, while weather prediction is limping along with .07 petaflops. See much more discussion on the topic here: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/05/us-climate-versus-weather-computers.html
Is it weird in here, or is it just me?
... how many apps does it have?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
In other news.. no global warming for 16 years now...
http://notrickszone.com/2012/10/16/luningvahrenholt-comment-on-hadcruts-16-years-of-no-warming-tough-times-ahead-for-climate-science/
Counterpoint.
Have the icecaps been melting in those 16 years? Has humidity in the air increased? Has the total thermal energy on the planet risen in this period of time? Do you have a clue what you are talking about?
next step is weather control and need to research in a lab setting be for taking it full scale
I wonder how much heat that machine emits.
NCAR - We confirm your still f#cked, only faster!
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yesterday.
to power this behemoth?
I guess by the time they make a climate prediction breakthrough, the energy required to power would have produced megatons of CO2 that would have negated the progressions....
Surprising nobody has identified the purchase price in a fraud lawsuit - yet.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
Wow, I didn't know we had data collection points every 10km on the earth's surface, to provide input into a simulation. I suppose that now, we can get an excruciatingly precise, with no increase in accuracy climate predictions.
The facility is mainly cooled by the ambient air, except for the hottest days of summer. Despite the approximately 30x increase in compute capacity, the Yellowstone cluster only requires not quite 2x the electric power of the previous system, Bluefire, a Power 6 based cluster.
...is CAN IT RUN DOOM?
With the amount of energy that thing will release? I'd say this step is weather control...
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
The models suck. They've always sucked. Of the roughly 39 current climate models, not one of them has predicted anything accurately... even when trying to predict old conditions with older data. A faster computer will just get you the same wrong result, only faster.
Climate deniers have rejected the results of the new, higher speed climate models in 3 femtoseconds, proving even faster than the new supercomputer.
It needs to take into account all the heat it generates and the CO2 produce to calculate the heat it generates and the CO2 produced to calculate the heat it...
Not to mention playing a REALLY FAST game of Angry Birds!
clarify a bit: the arctic has been melting "a little"... Antarctica has been gaining ice. I'll give you a 1/4 fail on that one.
If climate scientists run a supercomputer in a room full of warming skeptics, does it give off any heat?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
The grandparent is a marvelous example of so called sceptics angaging in no scepticism at all, while the parent is a beatiful example of journalists making the actual effort to check, and doublecheck the sources. Too bad one cannot argue a person out of a posititon he didn't argue himself into...
From the summary: NCAR believes it is the world's most powerful computer dedicated to geosciences.
And, still, it won't provide enough computational power to discriminate between natural phenomena and anthropogenic global warming.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caldera_Network_Desktop (reincarnated edition ;-))
I'm a little confused, since I am not an expert on climatology, but this [source] seems to suggest that the global oceanic thermal energy (aka "heat content") has risen. The point of my post is that "the temperature is constant" is only one part of a complicated issue. Your ice tea is "warming up" while it is sitting out, but its temperature stays constant as long as the ice cubes haven't melted. "I'll give you 1/4 success on that one."
Funny choice of software - the volcanic caldera in Yellowstone is going to blow; it's been very active the past few years.
They've got 72,000 cores, but their software license only allows them to use 2 at a time.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
Betcha $100,000,000 they power this climate change research computing system off coal power.
Nyak Nyak.
"..such as methane gas released from thawing tundra on polar sea ice.."
If that's a typical example of the level of scientific accuracy of these models, no wonder they are so comprehensively wrong...
It just might be able to play Crysis!
Or will it heavily modify the climate itself with its power hunger while computing?
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I'm a little confused, since I am not an expert on climatology, but this [source] seems to suggest that the global oceanic thermal energy (aka "heat content") has risen. The point of my post is that "the temperature is constant" is only one part of a complicated issue. Your ice tea is "warming up" while it is sitting out, but its temperature stays constant as long as the ice cubes haven't melted. "I'll give you 1/4 success on that one."
You forgot about the new ice cubes forming at the other end of the cup.
Just google "antarctica gaining ice" and you'll see hundreds of stories about this. The latest data has just come in, and it is clearly NOT melting.
The arctic is a different story. While we keep hearing about how it's melting, the winters have shown above average ice mass the last decade, despite all the chicken little crying about the arctic being "ice-free for the first time history" - neither of those things are true. It hasn't become ice-free, and if it did it wouldn't be the first time in history. The only thing one can say about the arctic for sure, is it seems to be melting a little more in the summer, and freezing a little more in the winter. So it's kind of a wash.
At least they don't have to pay Apple for rounding errors.
The truth is that every model has predicted unprecedented warming in the atmosphere, which just did came not true at all.
The Guardian brings up all kinds of arguments, but fails to counter the fact that there has been no warming. The deep ocean heat content is only a theory to cope with the failing models but has not been proven at all. Ocean heat was only brought up after reality failed to follow predictions by the models.
The Guardian is talking about Curry as some kind of layman who needs to read the Sceptical Science website. While she is in fact an established climate scientist. Talk about ignorance.
The warmists better spend their energy learning from the empirical findings and start improving their models instead of the sad scapegoat technique they are now resorting to.
...they can figure out why there's been no warming in the last 15 years.
Don't ask for a cite...look it up at MET.
If they were really concerned about climate change, they would be using an adiabatic computer for their simulations.
1.5 petaflops is not "roughly 30x" 77 teraflops; it's just under 20 times.
Probably it can play "Avatar" movie in real time, finally useful supercomputers are coming :). Unfortunately in low resolution. Full res takes 30-90 core-hours per frame(!).
Why is this modded down while the original post at +5 is wrong? The computer is not going to be used only for climate modeling, just the media isn't going to get all thrilled to talk about more mundane uses like weather prediction and research.
We'll need a white fuzzy cat supply.
I drank what? -- Socrates
The truth is that every model has predicted unprecedented warming in the atmosphere, which just did came not true at all.
Where'd you hear that "every model has predicted unprecedented warming in the atmosphere", the Daily Fail?
Hint: it is not a good idea to trust climate "skeptics". They're notorious liars.
Yeah, those massive ice sheets that thin and break off are not melting. Definitely not melting. Definitely...
will the computer tell the AGW crowd they are peddling junks science that much faster ?
About 4 times as much sea ice has been lost from the Arctic as has been gained in the Antarctic. The Antarctic ice sheets have been losing more ice than than the Antarctic sea ice has gained so the net there is still negative.
The gain in Antarctic sea ice is interesting. It has to do partly with the ozone hole over Antarctica and partly to do with global warming. The ozone hole causes stratospheric cooling which strengthens the circum-polar winds, blowing the existing sea ice around which opens up leads which subsequently refreezes. Global warming causes more precipitation which when falling on the ocean surface freshens the water making it less dense which reduces the mixing between the warmer saltier waters below and the colder surface waters reducing the ice melt at the surface and making the water easier to freeze.
The MET Office has refuted this story.
It doesn't matter how powerful your computer is, when you've got only the barest idea of the inputs and the parameters of your model, the output is still going to be crap. Assuming your model is any good in the first place, which is unlikely.
It will be able to exaggerate Climate Change propaganda, based on "flawed" data.. 30x faster...
Hint: it is not a good idea to trust climate "skeptics". They're notorious liars.
As opposed to global warming alarmists being undeniable and rock-solid pillars of truth, such as Schneider (who is no longer with us, RIP), who were extolling the dangers of the coming ice age in the 1960's and 70's. Everyone is entitled to change their mind ... who's to say that global warming alarmists won't change their minds in another 10 or 20 years when global warming is no longer fashionable and the next big pseudo-science disaster is upon us? Who's going to refund the trillions of dollars sucked out of the global economy due to the Carbon Credits scam?
The only good things to come out of the global warming fiasco are the research into alternative energy supplies and modes of transport, and improving the efficiency of internal combustion engines.
What the hell is angaging?
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek