Climate Change Research Gets Petascale Supercomputer 121
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."
Re:GW? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other news... (Score:4, Insightful)
Show me ONE climate model that has accurately predicted anything, ever.
With impossibly high standards like yours, it's a wonder any other physical model still holds up.
QED, for instance, will never accurately predict where a photon is going to land, but it will give you the probability of a photon hitting a specific area. Probability is a huge part of science and no scientist will tell you anything is 100% certain. Very high certainty for a range of conditions is what a model is intended to provide.
Re:Climate research vs. weather prediction (Score:2, Insightful)
Weather prediction = 7 days (mostly wrong)
Climate prediction = 1000 years (no idea on accuracy)
Gee I wonder why you would need more processing power ...
I tidied that up a bit.