Climate Change Research Gets Petascale Supercomputer

Posted by Soulskill on Tuesday October 16, 2012 @07:08AM from the researching-the-impact-of-supercomputers-on-the-environment dept.

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."

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speed is not the issue by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-16 07:34 · Score: 0, Troll

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.
Just Maybe... by Anonymous Coward · 2012-10-16 08:47 · Score: 0, Troll

...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.