From the Los Angeles Times:
New Wyoming supercomputer expected to boost atmospheric science
CHEYENNE, Wyo. — Here in the shortgrass prairie, where being stuck in
the ways of the Old West is a point of civic pride, scientists are
building a machine that will, in effect, look into the future.
This
month, on a barren Wyoming landscape dotted with gopher holes and hay
bales, the federal government is assembling a supercomputer 10 years in
the making, one of the fastest computers ever built and the largest ever
devoted to the study of atmospheric science.
The National Center
for Atmospheric Research's supercomputer has been dubbed Yellowstone,
after the nearby national park, but it could have been named Nerdvana.
The machine will have 100 racks of servers and 72,000 core processors,
so many parts that they must be delivered in the back of a 747.
Yellowstone will be capable of performing 1.5 quadrillion calculations —
a quadrillion is a 1 followed by 15 zeros — every second.
That's nearly a quarter of a
million calculations, each second, for every person on Earth. In a
little more than an hour, Yellowstone can do as many calculations as
there are grains of sand on every beach in the world.
The study of
climate and weather patterns has always been hamstrung by volatility —
by elements of chaos in the seas and the air. That challenge is most
famously summed up by the "butterfly effect," the idea that the flapping
of a butterfly's wings on the coast of Africa can determine whether a
hurricane will strike New Orleans.
The sheer speed of Yellowstone
is designed to burst through the limits of chaos theory — the
difference, allegorically, between predicting the odds of blackjack
after playing five hands versus playing a million. The machine is
expected to give scientists a clearer image of the state of the planet,
and its future, revolutionizing the study of climate change, extreme
weather events, wildfires, air pollution and more.
"These are
chaotic systems, but it's just math," said Richard Loft, director of
technology development at NCAR's Computational and Information Systems
Laboratory. "We play statistics in the climate game. We feed in the
basic laws of science, and out comes something that looks like the
Earth's climate. It's an instrument. This is a mathematical telescope."
NCAR
is in the business of research, not forecasting, but the tools and
advances produced from its research could have a profound effect on
forecasting. Armed with a high-fidelity portrait of Earth systems,
scientists around the United States can begin to pinpoint the regional
impact of changes in the weather and atmosphere.
Rather than
warning of a tornado risk in the central U.S. between noon and 9 p.m.,
scientists might one day warn of a tornado risk in Woodson County, Kan.,
between 1 and 3 p.m. Rather than warning of a hurricane striking the
coast of Texas, they hope to be able to warn of a hurricane striking the
town of Freeport, with a top wind speed of 90 mph and a tidal surge of 4
1/2 feet.
That regional accuracy is particularly critical in the
study of climate change. "The disaster of climate change happens on a
regional scale," Loft said. "Everything is connected."
For
example, once scientists use Yellowstone to help predict the melting of
ice at the North Pole, which means significant change in nearby waters,
they can better predict the patterns of storms that form in the Gulf of
Alaska. Then Yellowstone can help predict how those storms will deposit
snow atop the Sierra Nevada, down to precise changes in elevation on
individual faces of mountains.
That snow will melt, and the water
will run downhill — which means Yellowstone can help predict how much
water California will have to drink, even the most efficient locations
to build the state's reservoirs.
"It's taking the macro information and applying it to the things that matter," said Richard Neale, an NCAR project scientist.
The
computer will be housed in a futuristic, $70-million compound west of
Cheyenne. The National Science Foundation, which funds NCAR, is paying
$50 million of the tab. The state of Wyoming will pay for the rest. In
exchange, the state will occupy a dedicated chunk of the computer's
power and memory. University of Wyoming scientists hope to use
Yellowstone to advance "carbon sequestration," a promising method of
storing harmful gases underground to combat climate change and open new
avenues in industry.
Yellowstone will replace NCAR's Bluefire
system, a supercomputer in its own right, though this one will have
roughly 30 times the throughput of the old system.
Yellowstone
will hold 600 sets of atmospheric data in its vast memory bank —
temperatures, humidity, wind motion, rainfall. Information gleaned from
the world's data-collection systems — buoys in the ocean, wind monitors
fastened to the top of telephone poles — will be added to the archive.
The
Wyoming compound is one of the most energy-efficient sites of its kind.
Heat generated by the computer will be recycled to warm workers'
offices, and pipes carrying the coolant water will have few 90-degree
angles; pumping water through pipes that bend at gentle angles requires
less energy.
The bulk of the machine will arrive at the 24-acre
compound this month. Once the racks are lashed together, scientists will
spend weeks "basically trying to break the system," said Anke Kamrath,
director of operations and services at NCAR's systems lab. If they
can't, they'll open it to researchers from across the nation, probably
in August. Scientists will make proposals to book an "allocation" on the
computer, similar to using minutes on a cellphone plan. Most will
access the computer remotely.
Many are champing at the bit. Some
hope to predict migration patterns of animals, others the success and
failure of certain farm crops, others specific hillsides that would be
the most efficient spots for wind turbines.
NCAR scientist Michael Wiltberger studies
solar flares, superheated gas that emanates from the sun, with the potential to be enormously disruptive on Earth.
"Right
now, we don't know why a particular configuration of the magnetic field
of the sun is going to erupt," Wiltberger said. "We need to know — and
now we can run millions times more models to provide meaningful
predictions."
Armed with better predictions of what will happen
when solar flares reach Earth — and where, precisely, they will occur —
scientists could warn energy companies to protect against power surges.
Global positioning systems could be disrupted, so farmers that use GPS
to map crops could be warned to suspend planting operations.
NCAR
senior scientist Morris Weisman specializes in a tricky corner of
science: severe, high-impact weather events, which are by definition so
rare that they are difficult to predict. "Scientifically non-satisfying"
is how Weisman puts it — but with such a leap in computer modeling, he
said, scientists could theoretically predict an extreme weather event
"within an hour, within a few kilometers."
"We can conceive of that now," he said. "It's really exciting."
Loft
marveled that such a dizzying array of experiments will be done using
time-tested and sometimes rudimentary math — 19th century laws of
thermal dynamics, rules of mechanics devised by Isaac Newton after an
apple supposedly bonked him on the head and got him thinking about
gravity. Yellowstone will use the same, just a whole lot of it at once.
"Newton
was thinking about apples, and the moon. He never would have imagined
that the same principles would have dictated the behavior of
hurricanes," Loft said. "This science stuff works."
The scientists
behind Yellowstone shrug at a bitter reality: cutting edge doesn't last
long in their world. The Wyoming facility was built with enough space
to accommodate the next generation of computer, which is already being
contemplated, before this one is put together.
"We won't be cool for long," Loft said. "This business is ephemeral. There's not much room for nostalgia."
