Brazil Climate Modellers to Go Global With Tupa Cray XT6

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Cray continues to get traction with its Project Baker XT6 systems. This week Nature.com reports that Climate modellers in Brazil are getting ready to unleash Tupã, a Cray XT6 supercomputer currently being deployed at Brazil’s Centre for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies in Cachoeira Paulista. Named after a native god of thunder, Tupa will have a peak processing speed of more than 244 teraflops, ranking it among the top 25 most powerful computers in the world.

Working with their counterparts at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK, Brazilian modellers will use Tupã to apply their expertise on the release of black carbon and other aerosols from Amazonian fires to the global climate-modelling arena. “We want to bring knowledge of the Amazon into our model, and that will then be an original contribution,” says Paulo Nobre, a senior modeller with the National Institute for Space Research.

Of particular interest is the potential impact of climate change on the Amazon region. The Hadley Centre’s simulations have found that a warming of surface waters in the northern equatorial Atlantic Ocean could shift precipitation northwards, resulting in a significant dieback of the rainforest later this century. That is consistent with a major Amazon drought in 2005 and a second one that is under way at present. Full Story