Earth Simulator Now Predicting Hurricanes? 167
GeoGreg writes "The BBC is reporting that the Japanese Earth Simulator supercomputer is producing results showing that it is possible to model climate down to the level of severe weather events such as hurricanes. This computer has been discussed on Slashdot previously, and it sounds like at least some of the hype around this beastie was justified."
But can it.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Distributed project (Score:5, Interesting)
for those who want to participate themselves. It is run by the University of Oxford in the UK, it is not affiliated with . So far only a windows client, but a Linux one is in the works. It is very CPU intensive, so if you have less than an 800mhz processor you shouldn't bother, it would take months to finish a single unit of work.
Hey, do you find it suprising that the nation that knows the least about climate science [smirkingchimp.com] is the one that is most skeptical about global warming?
"In little more than a decade, the United States has fallen significantly behind other countries in its ability to simulate and predict long-term shifts in climate, according to a wide range of scientists and recent federal studies."
"During the Clinton administration, the lack of American modeling leadership did not have a discernible impact on climate policy, various experts said. But it did prevent the United States from playing a more central role in writing critical sections of the Intergovernmental Panel's report -- particularly the part assessing the extent of human influence on the warming trend of recent decades.
In computing power, Dr. Sarachik said, "our top two centers together don't amount to one-fifth of the European effort."
In that article from the New York Times is from two years ago! It mentions the japanese plans to build the Earth Simulator.
Predicting Hurricaines.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Neat Trick But... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Output (Score:4, Interesting)
I would hope so. The National Center for Environmental Predictions (NCEP [noaa.gov]) does this now with their model called the Global Forecast System (GFS [noaa.gov]) that goes out to 384 hours or 16 days. With this model, they do something called ensemble forecasts where they rerun the model another ten times at a reduced resolution from the master run with perturbations added to each. Then they compare the results and will, on some of the graphics, use all ten to perform a type of averaging to remove the really bogus forecasts.
My experience has been if you are doing any type of long range forecasting, the ensemble method is the way to go. I am not saying that it is exact, but has proven an invaluable guide past day 4 for good long range forecasting. My guess is that this project in Japan would be taking this into account and performing something like this type of ensemble method. If not, I would seriously question their results.
Re:10km resolution (Score:5, Interesting)
Define "the most general of weather trends". Currently, at least for here in the US, the model of choice (something always of debate) is the Eta [noaa.gov] that typically is run at 44km (they have much higher resolutions, but those aren't as readily available). Believe it or not, this model has been great at forecasting for frontal based weather (like thunderstorms along a cold front) and winter storm systems (it is able to place the areas of heavy snow by county) Depending on how close the model run is the the event, the placement of this information is usually pretty close.
That isn't to say it is perfect. As you could imagine for a grid that size, the model will typically miss popcorn type showers and thunderstorms. Also, if you do any severe weather forecasting, you will miss the small scale features like a tornado or such.
They have something called the RUC [noaa.gov] which is run at 20km. I am not as familiar with this model, but a person I work with has used it to do tornado forecasting (check out the historic data towards the bottom) [wxcaster.com] and has had incredible results.
Hurricanes and Tornadoes are man-made. (Score:2, Interesting)
Sometimes you feel like a nut, and sometimes you don't... Sad really.
Re:No pussy-footing for NEC (Score:2, Interesting)
Also - keep in mind that linpack favors machines with very low latency, high bandwidth interconnects. But - in some simulations / applications this is irrelevant. Some applications demand this bandwidth/latency - but others transfer relatively small, but very difficult problems among CPU's. (SETI @ HOME is a decent laymen example of this... A work unit is quite small, but requires a lot of cpu time to process.) Thus actual performance of an application like this would more closely approximate the Rpeak figure rather than the Rmax figure on those linpack tests. These kinds of applications would tend to favor the x86 clusters on the top500 list more heavily, because in raw MIPS they are quite strong.