Over at NICS, Scott Gibson writes that climate researchers are using supercomputers to study the rate and extent of rapid greening of high-elevation landscapes caused by Global Warming.

The left map depicts areas in Yellowstone National Park that comprise the summer and winter range for the northern elk herd. The map on the right shows the elevation range over which the green wave occurs.

These types of analysis are beyond the reach of personal computers, and we typically had to work with large, disparate, high-resolution data sets that included vegetation layers, snow water equivalent data, and fine-scale temperature data,” said researcher Karthik Ram of the University of California, Berkeley. “RDAV and NICS made it possible to leverage high-performance computing to model these data in an efficient manner. For example, they have been very supportive in providing the resources to scale my analysis in the R programming language across a large number of cores on Nautilus. As the volume of data continues to grow, facilities like NICS and RDAV will be key to analyzing and drawing meaningful results without drowning in too much information.”

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IBM has announced a major advance in the ability to use light instead of electrical signals to transmit information for future computing.

The breakthrough technology – silicon nanophotonics – allows the integration of different optical components side-by-side with electrical circuits on a single silicon chip – using, for the first time, sub-100nm semiconductor technology.

Silicon nanophotonics takes advantage of pulses of light for communication and provides a super highway for large volumes of data to move at rapid speeds between computer chips in servers, large data centers, and supercomputers, thus alleviating the limitations of congested data traffic and high-cost traditional interconnects.

This technology breakthrough is a result of more than a decade of pioneering research at IBM,” said John Kelly, senior vice president and director of IBM Research. “This allows us to move silicon nanophotonics technology into a real-world manufacturing environment that will have impact across a range of applications.”

The amount of data being created and transmitted over enterprise networks continues to grow due to an explosion of new applications and services. Silicon nanophotonics, now primed for commercial development, can enable the industry to keep pace with increasing demands in chip performance and computing power.

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This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.