Growing up in the Midwest, I saw my share of severe weather. The sirens would go off and we would have only a few minutes to take cover in the nearest basement.
Now supercomputers are being used to improve that lead time and predict how destructive a tornado will be. While that might not be too surprising, this new story in International Science Grid This Week describes how modern stormchasers used Windows as part of their supercomputing workflow.
A lot of scientists use Windows tools such as Excel,” Plale explained. “We think that utilizing a Windows workflow system on a Windows box is a step towards providing broader flexibility, because of this affinity of a lot of scientists to use Excel and because of the emergence of the cloud-based Azure platform.”
Most of the data assimilation experiments conducted by the research group make use of a supercomputer at NCAR. According to the article, the conclusions they reach could ultimately lead to improved forecasts.
