Jaguar, World's Most Powerful Supercomputer 154
Protoclown writes "The National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS), located at Oak Ridge National Labs (ORNL) in Tennessee, has upgraded the Jaguar supercomputer to 1.64-petaflops for use by scientists and engineers working in areas such as climate modeling, renewable energy, materials science, fusion and combustion. The current upgrade is the result of an addition of 200 cabinets of the Cray XT5 to the existing 84 cabinets of the XT4 Jaguar system. Jaguar is now the world's most powerful supercomputer available for open scientific research."
Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Economics? (Score:3, Interesting)
Look at the caption on your graph. Hansen's Scenario A is a high emissions scenario which does not correspond to the emissions which actually occurred. If you want to legitimately test the skill of a climate model, you need to compare apples to apples. In this case, Hansen's Scenario B is the one that most closely corresponded to the real emissions trajectory. (Since Hansen is a climate scientist, not an economist, he gave a range of possible emissions scenarios and did not claim the world would follow any specific one of them.) Even Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit acknowledges this.
Your snide reference to "Saint Gore" indicates that your skepticism has more to do with your emotional biases than with any true scientific motivation. And citing a graph which makes a point of comparing a single month's temperature to another month's temperature makes me question your critical thinking skills. (Well, choosing to get your "science" from skeptic web sites instead of from the scientific literature is the main reason to question your criticial thinking skills.) But if you want to read some science, you could start here [sciencemag.org].
Re:Climate modeling ves. fusion energy (Score:3, Interesting)
Climate change is gradual, but the emissions we put into the atmosphere today will last for centuries. Even if we switched over to all fusion power tomorrow, we'd still see more climate change, and the longer we wait to replace fossil fuels, the more we will see. Realistically, it takes a long time to widely deploy a new energy technology. Fusion isn't even feasible in the lab, let alone ready for deployment, let alone widely deployed.
Also, even if fusion were widely deployed, that doesn't mean we'd necessarily have less fossil fuel emissions. Coal plants are cheap because they're already built, so we might just keep running them instead of shutting them down and having to build a new fusion plant, even a cheap one. They typically have operating lifetimes of over 50 years.
Re:Economics? (Score:4, Interesting)
Scientists are always so sure they are right. And then a few decades pass and they realize they weren't. And then they repeat that same behavior.
Not really. Most scientists know they're always wrong, they just try to be less wrong each time. Hence the scientific method.
There's a brilliant article by Asimov about it, in fact, "The Relativity of Wrong" if you care about it.
Beep Beep (Score:3, Interesting)
In the not too distant future, we shall see a new Top 500 list. It just seems like yesterday that RoadRunner cracked the Petaflops barrier, and the whole world seems to have fallen on its ass in the interim. Banking failures, government bailouts, people losing their retirement portfolios. The irony is too much. Even as the computers get better, the answers that people need don't come fast enough.
Then the light turned on for me. People in general, the people you see on the street going on their busy way to whatever, are mostly relying on "someone else" to come up with the answers. Most people have little confidence in their own ability to answer hard questions.
Well, maybe things will turn around because of the power of supercomputers. It would be about time, wouldn't it? Here's how it may play out. Supercomputers so far, good as they are, serve up expensive results, so they are applied to difficult problems that are useful but far removed from everyday life.
As supercomputer clock cycles become more abundant, researchers can apply them to do more mundane things that the unwashed can relate to. The result could be revolutionary. People who have always aspired to some inconsequential achievement that requires some expertise or training may suddenly have access to highly instructive supercomputer-generated procedures that explain both how and why. Not only will people become more expert do-it-yourselfers, but robots will become far versatile, with amazing repertoires.
Crossing the petaflops barrier may be sufficient psychological incentive for people to request that governments begin to make supercomputing infrastructure available for public consumption, like roads and other services. Certainly, exciting times are comiing.