IT Struggles with Climate Change

Climatologists tracking global warming need all the computing horsepower they can get

By Gary Anthes

February 6, 2006 12:00 PM ET

Computerworld - Corporate IT managers who never seem to have enough CPU power, disk space, bandwidth or funding might take comfort from U.S. climate scientists. Computerworld's Gary H. Anthes recently talked with two of them and learned that even having access to the world's most powerful information systems is not enough.
Patrick Heimbach is a research scientist in physical oceanography at MIT, and James Hack heads up climate modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Both scientists use their own organizations' computer systems, as well as those at supercomputer centers around the U.S.


Patrick Heimbach is a research scientist in physical oceanography at MIT

What are you working on at MIT?
Heimbach: We are trying to see if we can simulate, if we can understand, what the ocean has been doing over the last couple of decades. Are we heading toward a warmer world? Is [warming due to] internal variability of the [oceanic and atmospheric] system, or is there something we are doing to the system?
Do you have the computational power to do that?
Heimbach: What we ultimately would like to run we can't currently fit on any computer. We would need on the order of 20,000 processors, and probably two orders of magnitude faster processors. Each supercomputer center allocates a certain amount of computing time to a specific group. So we have to size down the problem we are addressing for that specific machine.
So it seems you must beg, borrow and steal computer resources for this work.
Heimbach: We have to find the cycles where we can find them. But even for the machines that are available, if we really wanted to go to the actual [spatial] resolutions that we need, we probably would not be able to fit those problems on those machines. Give us any machine, and we can immediately fill it with an interesting problem, and we'll still have the feeling we are limited.


James Hack heads up climate modeling at the National Center for Atmospheric Research

Hack: Climate and weather applications... push high-performance computer technology. A decade ago, global climate applications benefited from the extraordinary memory bandwidth of proprietary high-performance architectures, like the parallel vector architectures from Cray and NEC. As scientific computing migrated toward the commodity platforms, interconnect technology, both in terms of bandwidth and latency, became the limiting factor on application performance and continues to be a performance bottleneck.
Is the Internet adequate for connecting you to the supercomputer centers you use around the U.S.?
Heimbach: Transferring several terabytes of data

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