The UK Met Office (of which the Hadley Centre is a part) have used US supercomputers for a long time now (and those were chosen via a completely free competitive procurement process). As the original NYTimes article states, they are now recognised as being one of the world leaders in climate research. The modelling code, the Unified Model, a very large and complex model (used for weather forecasting as well as climate prediction) was ported from vector shared-memory C90 to RISC distributed-memory T3E. That required effort, but it shows that it can be done.
This is a monte-carlo approach (hence the name Casino-21). Each machine will run a completely *independent* climate simulation with no interaction with anyone else's machine. The point being that each simulation is set of with a slightly different set of options on the "control dials" of the model. The big ensemble of results will then help scientists determine the sensitivity of the climate to different effects.
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The UK Met Office (of which the Hadley Centre is a part) have used US supercomputers for a long time now (and those were chosen via a completely free competitive procurement process). As the original NYTimes article states, they are now recognised as being one of the world leaders in climate research. The modelling code, the Unified Model, a very large and complex model (used for weather forecasting as well as climate prediction) was ported from vector shared-memory C90 to RISC distributed-memory T3E. That required effort, but it shows that it can be done.
This is a monte-carlo approach (hence the name Casino-21). Each machine will run a completely *independent* climate simulation with no interaction with anyone else's machine. The point being that each simulation is set of with a slightly different set of options on the "control dials" of the model. The big ensemble of results will then help scientists determine the sensitivity of the climate to different effects.