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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."
Thank you for being a friend
Traveled down the road and back again
Your heart is true, you're a pal and a cosmonaut.
And if you threw a party
Invited everyone you knew
You would see the biggest gift would be from me
And the card attached would say, thank you for being a friend.
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.
They can figure out why the average surface temperature hasn't risen in 16 years.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2217286/Global-warming-stopped-16-years-ago-reveals-Met-Office-report-quietly-released--chart-prove-it.html
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/
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?
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....
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.
...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!
It's just goin' around in circles... shouldn't be that hard to predict.
If climate scientists run a supercomputer in a room full of warming skeptics, does it give off any heat?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
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 ;-))
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...
We can massage the data to our liking even faster than people can review the results.
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.
...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.
It doesn't matter how detailed your simulation is if it is operating on faulty models. If it only simulates part of the problem or ignores significant factors such as changes in solar radiation, density of space dust, etc. There are so many complex inter-relations that they will never have an accurate model.
With this type of simulation step N+1 depends upon the results of step N so the margin of error will increase until it is meaningless.
If they cannot predict the weather tomorrow, then they have no business attempting to simulate the 'average' weather years from now.
The results of this simulation have a 99.999% chance of being wrong and ultimately they will tweak the simulation until it gives them the result they are looking for. How else do they 'know' their simulation is working unless it produces what they expect from the beginning?
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
will the computer tell the AGW crowd they are peddling junks science that much faster ?
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...