UK Builds Largest Climate Model Ever - Japan Supercomputer Sole "Player"

[hatrack]

"Now British researchers have built the biggest such model. It is so ambitious it may be able to warn of "surprises" - sudden, potentially disastrous leaps in climate change which have not so far been predicted but which could overwhelm any defensive preparations for global warming.

It will almost certainly make the most accurate predictions yet about how the atmosphere will heat up during the coming century, and how the climate may change, with more extreme weather events such as hurricanes and violent rain.

But it is so big it cannot be run on any computer in Britain; it can be operated only on a giant supercomputer in Yokohama called the Earth Simulator. Everything about the Earth Simulator, the biggest super-computer in the world when it was built two years ago, and still the fastest machine of its type anywhere, is awesome.It needs a floor area the size of four tennis courts to house its 5,120 processors, and it has a speed of 36 teraflops, or 36 trillion - yes, that is 36,000,000,000,000 - floating-point operations (or calculations) per second.

In Tokyo on Wednesday, Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, will launch a five-year UK-Japanese collaboration on climate change science, that will enable the Earth Simulator to run the new climate model (supervised by a team of six UK scientists who will move to Japan) and put Britain at the cutting edge of foretelling the future the modern way."

EDIT

http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/environment/story.jsp?story=601499

Surprise, surprise - the US has nothing to do with either the program or the computer! :eyes: