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 ice-cap 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 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." |
