Slashdot Mirror
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?
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.
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!
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
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.
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.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those running Linux!
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
...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).
Climate deniers have rejected the results of the new, higher speed climate models in 3 femtoseconds, proving even faster than the new supercomputer.
If climate scientists run a supercomputer in a room full of warming skeptics, does it give off any heat?
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
Hopefully they built it in a country where nuclear or hydro is still legal.
c++;
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."
They've got 72,000 cores, but their software license only allows them to use 2 at a time.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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.
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...
That data is called "anomalous" and discarded.
At least they don't have to pay Apple for rounding errors.
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.
No it's coal-fired
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
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.
*golf clap*
I drank what? -- Socrates
We'll need a white fuzzy cat supply.
I drank what? -- Socrates
It's the mesh. The starting data can be interpolated.
You might want to look up mesh density and what it does for simulations.
Here is a direct response from the MET Office on that subject. There's a nice graph at the bottom that ranks years from hottest to coldest colour coded by decade. To quote them:
Over the last 140 years global surface temperatures have risen by about 0.8C. However, within this record there have been several periods lasting a decade or more during which temperatures have risen very slowly or cooled. The current period of reduced warming is not unprecedented and 15 year long periods are not unusual.
15 years of data is simply too short a time to make definitive statements about warming in the face of natural variability.
No climate models "successfully predicted 15 years of stagnation" because that's not what they're designed to do. In fact you probably couldn't write a model that would be successful at predicting a 15 year stagnation because of natural variability. The climate models I'm familiar with generally use 30 year averages for their projections and have since the 1980's. A paper from last year statistically analyzed the issue and found it requires at least 17 years of temperature records to separate the signal of warming from the noise of natural variability.
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.
I think dcblogs had a typo and meant to write "or".
I've read that they moved the site to wyoming - a coal powered area - instead of their much greaner existing HQ in Boulder colorado. Reason? The electricity is cheaper.
What the hell is angaging?
"There can be little doubt that union activities lead to continuous and progressive inflation." F. A. Hayek