March 5, 2004
UC Irvine supercomputer project aims to predict earth’s environmental future
By Brock Read
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/tmp/Zender Chronicle of Higher Education 03-05-04 UC Irvine supercompuer project aims to predict earth's environmental future.doc
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."
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/tmp/Zender Chronicle of Higher Education 03-05-04 UC Irvine supercompuer project aims to predict earth's environmental future.doc