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."

Re:GW?

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news.. no global warming for 16 years now...

http://notrickszone.com/2012/10/16/luningvahrenholt-comment-on-hadcruts-16-years-of-no-warming-tough-times-ahead-for-climate-science/

Counterpoint [guardian.co.uk].

Re:Climate research vs. weather prediction

[buglista]

You are a dick; in future please try googling for something before spouting off. Even the UK has a petaflop for weather. http://www.zdnet.com/met-office-buys-ibm-petaflop-supercomputer-3039457156/ [zdnet.com]

Re:Climate research vs. weather prediction

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you could search for "US meteorology petaflops" and you get the an article in the first link on Google.... which happens to be the same computer being discussed in the summary here, because NCAR does short term forecast computation work too. So with this unit alone, US weather computing power is 1.6 petaflops too.

Re:Maybe

[riverat1]

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.