Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Climate Change Research Gets Petascale Supercomputer

Posted by Soulskill on 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."

3 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. What's the carbon footprint of this machine? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    Hey look, when we model the city where the machine is, there's a hot spot. What could be causing it?

    1. Re:What's the carbon footprint of this machine? by gmuslera · · Score: 5, Funny

      The computer will be so big that instead of predicting the climate change, will provoke it.

  2. In other news... by fredrated · · Score: 5, Funny

    Climate deniers have rejected the results of the new, higher speed climate models in 3 femtoseconds, proving even faster than the new supercomputer.