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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?
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?
NCAR - We confirm your still f#cked, only faster!
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
and how much thinner is this new version?
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
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.
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
Sure, but Crysis only gets 3fps.
Om, nomnomnom...
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...
They've got 72,000 cores, but their software license only allows them to use 2 at a time.
Everything is better with chainsaws.
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.
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.