March 5, 2004
UC Irvine supercomputer project aims to predict earth’s environmental
future
By Brock Read
Still not convinced that global warming
is a problem? A new supercomputer at
the University of California at Irvine
may help turn more skeptics into
believers, says Charles Zender, an
assistant professor of earth system
science.
In February, the university announced
the debut of the Virtual Climate Time
Machine -- a computing system designed
by IBM to help Irvine scientists predict
earth's meteorological and
environmental future. The
supercomputer, which consists of eight
powerful servers connected to work
together in parallel, is among the fastest
in the University of California system.
Climatologists at Irvine have been using
computer simulations for years to track
the environmental effects of phenomena
like rising fossil-fuel emissions and
disappearing sea ice. But the new
supercomputer will allow them to
attempt more ambitious models that can
weigh a greater number of factors -including widely recognized variables,
like man-made pollutants and polar-ice
movements, and more esoteric ones, like
volcanic disturbances and underwater
ecosystems.
"In the past, we've had to work through
national supercomputing centers
whenever we wanted to run a large
simulation or test a new idea," says Mr.
Zender. "Now, our researchers will be
able to effortlessly combine their studies
and integrate them into full-scale
models."
That's good news for scientists who fret
about global warming. Doubters have
often discredited climate-change
research by pointing to variables left
unexamined by simulations, according to
Mr. Zender. "But these arguments get
more and more tenuous as the processes
we can't represent get more and more
recherché," he says.
Scientists won't use the supercomputer
just to make prognostications about the
state of the climate 10 or 20 years down
the line.
They will also sift through troves of old
data -- like temperature records and icecap measurements -- that might offer
insight into what causes drastic climate
shifts.
In short, they'll comb over a lot of raw
data. "Because they're simulating
physical processes over time, they're
chewing up a lot of computing power,"
says Dave Turek, vice president of
IBM's Deep Computing program.
The university will also use the
computer system to introduce students to
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an array of advanced computer
simulations, according to Mr. Zender.
Officials at Irvine hope the
supercomputer will attract students
interested in cutting-edge climatology.
"We operate under the implicit
assumption that the earth is a giant
experiment we're conducting unwittingly
right now in real life," he says. "The idea
behind climate modeling is that, with
these virtual time machines, we can
control the experiment."
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