In this special guest feature from Scientific Computing World, Robert Roe reports on the Gordon Bell Prize finalists for 2018. “The finalist’s research ranges from AI to mixed precision workloads, with some taking advantage of the Tensor Cores available in the latest generation of Nvidia GPUs. This highlights the impact of AI and GPU technologies, which are opening up not only new applications to HPC users but also the opportunity to accelerate mixed precision workloads on large scale HPC systems.”
NOAA and NCAR team up for Weather and Climate Modeling
February 8, 2019 by Leave a Comment
The United States is making exciting changes to how computer models will be developed in the future to support the nation’s weather and climate forecast system. NOAA and the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) have joined forces to help the nation’s weather and climate modeling scientists achieve mutual benefits through more strategic collaboration, shared resources and information.
NERSC: Sierra Snowpack Could Drop Significantly By End of Century
January 1, 2019 by Leave a Comment
A future warmer world will almost certainly feature a decline in fresh water from the Sierra Nevada mountain snowpack. Now a new study by Berkeley Lab shows how the headwater regions of California’s 10 major reservoirs, representing nearly half of the state’s surface storage, found they could see on average a 79 percent drop in peak snowpack water volume by 2100. “What’s more, the study found that peak timing, which has historically been April 1, could move up by as much as four weeks, meaning snow will melt earlier, thus increasing the time lag between when water is available and when it is most in demand.”
NOAA Report: Effects of Persistent Arctic Warming Continue to Mount
December 11, 2018 by Leave a Comment
NOAA is out with their 2018 Arctic Report Card and the news is not good, folks. Issued annually since 2006, the Arctic Report Card is a timely and peer-reviewed source for clear, reliable and concise environmental information on the current state of different components of the Arctic environmental system relative to historical records. “The Report Card is intended for a wide audience, including scientists, teachers, students, decision-makers and the general public interested in the Arctic environment and science.”
Video: Weather and Climate Modeling at Convection-Resolving Resolution
January 14, 2018 by Leave a Comment
David Leutwyler from ETH Zurich gave this talk at the 2017 Chaos Communication Congress. “The representation of thunderstorms (deep convection) and rain showers in climate models represents a major challenge, as this process is usually approximated with semi-empirical parameterizations due to the lack of appropriate computational resolution. Climate simulations using kilometer-scale horizontal resolution allow explicitly resolving deep convection and thus allow for an improved representation of the water cycle. We present a set of such simulations covering Europe and global computational domains.”
GPUs Power Near-global Climate Simulation at 1 km Resolution
October 12, 2017 by Leave a Comment
A new peer-reviewed paper is reportedly causing a stir in the climatology community. “The best hope for reducing long-standing global climate model biases, is through increasing the resolution to the kilometer scale. Here we present results from an ultra-high resolution non-hydrostatic climate model for a near-global setup running on the full Piz Daint supercomputer on 4888 GPUs.”
Panasas Upgrades JASMIN Super-Data-Cluster Facility to 20PB
September 26, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Today Panasas announced that the Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (SFTC) Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in the UK has expanded its JASMIN super-data-cluster with an additional 1.6 petabytes of Panasas ActiveStor storage, bringing total storage capacity to 20PB. This expansion required the formation of the largest realm of Panasas storage worldwide, which is managed by a single systems administrator. Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1-3PB of data every day.
Supercomputers turn the clock back on Storms with “Hindcasting”
July 25, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Researchers are using supercomputers at LBNL to determine how global climate change has affected the severity of storms and resultant flooding. “The group used the publicly available model, which can be used to forecast future weather, to “hindcast” the conditions that led to the Sept. 9-16, 2013 flooding around Boulder, Colorado.”
Interview: Dr. Christoph Schär on Escaping the Data Avalanche for Climate Modeling
July 13, 2017 by Leave a Comment
“There are large efforts towards refining the horizontal resolution of climate models to O(1 km) with the intent to represent convective clouds explicitly rather than using semi-empirical parameterizations. This refinement would move the governing equations closer to first principles and is expected to reduce the uncertainties of climate models. However, the output volume of climate simulations would dramatically grow, and storing it for later analysis would likely become impractical, due to limited I/O bandwidth and mass-storage capacity. In this presentation we discuss possible solutions to this challenge.”
Evolving Storage and Cyber Infrastructure at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation
May 27, 2017 by Leave a Comment
Ellen Salmon from NASA gave this talk at the 2017 MSST conference. “This talk will describe recent developments at the NASA Center for Climate Simulation, which is funded by NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, and supports the specialized data storage and computational needs of weather, ocean, and climate researchers, as well as astrophysicists, heliophysicists, and planetary scientists.”
