The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced this week that it has finally completed a nine-year, $180 million project aimed at installing new supercomputers to aid in more accurately predicting weather. The primary IBM supercomputer is now called Stratus. Its backup is dubbed Cirrus.
The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are capable of making 69.7 trillion calculations per second. According to NOAA, the faster the calculation speeds, the greater the chances that meteorologists can rapidly update severe weather forecasts as dangerous weather affects local communities. Billions of bytes are entered into the supercomputers each day to help predict the weather more accurately.
Just how important NOAA's new supercomputers are to our understanding and prediction of weather is easily understated.
Right now, Stratus contains about 20 weather models that predict worldwide weather accurately for about five days. A few decades ago, weather models could forecast weather accurately up to only about two days.
Those 20 weather models rarely change. They analyze conditions such as temperature, humidity, and precipitation to give organizations ranging from the National Weather Service to local meteorologists data on which they can base forecasts.
According to Ben Kyger, director of central operations for the National Center of Environmental Prediction, a division of NOAA, "We analyze weather conditions on grids we lay over maps of the world. In order for meteorologists to accurately predict a hurricane's path, for example, NOAA needs to pinpoint weather conditions in 1-kilometer grids of distance." Right now, those spans "are not even close to that."
How does it work?
In order to improve forecasting, a lot of work needs to be done. Right now, scientists from around the world are analyzing Stratus' weather models to find ways to improve them. When they think that they've come up with an improvement, NOAA analyzes the new models.
If it likes what it sees, NOAA takes it open source. It installs the new model on the Cirrus supercomputer to run in parallel with the approved model on Stratus. Scientists, weather experts, and even you and I can view the new model and inspect it for errors. Errors found are removed or tweaked. If no errors can be found, and the new data enhances weather forecasting, it will be put into operation and replace the existing model that it improved upon.
... Read MoreDon Reisinger is a technology columnist who has written about everything from HDTVs to computers to Flowbee Haircut Systems. Don is a member of the CNET Blog Network, and posts at The Digital Home. He is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure.
Big Blue's supercomputers are among the greenest in the world.
An IBM supercomputer won first place in a new list ranking the world's most energy-efficient supercomputers.
The June Green500 list, announced June 30 and published by Green500.org, also showed that 18 of the top 20 greenest supercomputers in the world are made by Big Blue.
The group also said that the average efficiency of the supercomputers rose by 10 percent, even as the aggregate power of the machines on the list increased 15 percent.
A key factor in determining a supercomputer's energy efficiency is the number of operations per watt.
Winning the title as most energy-efficient system was an IBM supercomputer based on an IBM BladeCenter QS22 located in Poland at the Interdisciplinary Center for Mathematical and Computational Modeling at the University of Warsaw. The computer produces more than 536 Mflops (millions of floating point operations per second) per watt of energy.
The world's fastest supercomputer, the IBM supercomputer at Los Alamos National Laboratories, came in fourth for energy efficiency, producing over 444 Mflops per watt of energy.
"Modern supercomputers can no longer focus only on raw performance," said David Turek, vice president of deep computing at IBM. "To be commercially viable these systems most also be energy efficient. IBM has a rich history of innovation that has significantly increased energy efficiency of our systems at all levels of the system that are designed to simultaneously reduce data center costs and energy use."
The Green500 group also noted that the No. 5 supercomputer, GRAPE-DR of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, is "arguably" the first on its list with more than a million processing elements--in this case, 2.1 million.
Unveiled in 2007, the Green500 list is published two to three times a year by Green500.org. It typically serves as a follow-up to the Top 500 list of worldwide supercomputers announced by Top500.org. In the most recent Top 500 list revealed last month, the Los Alamos supercomputer built by IBM hit a peak performance of 1.105 petaflop/s (quadrillions of floating point operations per second).
Roadrunner maintains its lead as the fastest supercomputer in the world.
(Credit: IBM)Despite the Jaguar nipping at its heels, Roadrunner continues to speed past the supercomputing pack.
That's according to the twice yearly Top500 list of the fastest supercomputers in the world, which is to be announced Tuesday morning at the 2009 International Supercomputing Conference in Hamburg, Germany. The list is released in June and November every year.
The IBM supercomputer housed at the Department of Energy's Los Alamos National Laboratory, known as Roadrunner, maintains the lead it grabbed a year ago. The computer can process 1.105 petaflop/s, or quadrillions of floating point operations per second, according to the Top500 Linpack benchmark. Hot on its heels for the second year in a row is the Cray XT5 Jaguar system at the DOE's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which clocked in at 1.059 petaflop/s.
Despite the consistency of those top two systems, there were some newcomers to the top 10 of the list of 500 this year, and not from within the U.S. The new IBM computer, known as JUGENE, installed at Forschungszentrum Juelich in Germany hit 825.5 teraflop/s, or trillions of floating point operations per second, which was good enough for third place on the list. Forschungszentrum Juelich also is home to the 10th place supercomputer, JUROPA, which is a combination of Bull Novascale and Sun Sunblade x6048 servers. It achieved 274.8 teraflop/s.
The rest of the top 10 fastest computers in the world are all housed in the U.S. But some notable international sites are demanding attention. An IBM BlueGene/P system at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology in Saudi Arabia took 14th place, while the Dawning 5000A at the Shanghai Supercomputer Center in China took 15th place.
The threshold to get on the Top500 list this year got increasingly tough. The slowest computer on the list hit 17.1 teraflop/s, when six months ago the slowest computer on the list achieved 12.64 teraflop/s. That also means the total combined power of the 500 supercomputers is faster than ever at 22.6 petaflop/s. Six months ago the top 500 hit 16.95 petaflop/s, and 11.7 petaflop/s a year ago.
Despite holding some of the top spots, IBM's overall dominance as the top supplier of servers for these supercomputers has been eclipsed by Hewlett-Packard. While IBM leads in overall installed performance, HP has the greater market share at 212 to IBM's 188.
Inside those servers, Intel has the lion's share of processors, with just under 80 percent, or 399 of the top 500. IBM Power processors are the second-most popular, and can be found in 55 of the systems.
The Top 10 List:
• Roadrunner, IBM, Los Alamos National Laboratory (1.105 petaflop/s)
• Jaguar, Cray, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (1.059 petaflop/s)
• JUGENE, IBM, Forschungszentrum Juelich (825.5 teraflop/s)
• Pleiades, SGI, NASA Ames Research Center (487.01 teraflop/s)
• BlueGeneL, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (478.2 teraflop/s)
• Kraken XT5, Cray, National Institute for Computational Sciences (463.3 teraflop/s)
• BlueGene/P, IBM, Argonne National Laboratory (458.61 teraflop/s)
• Ranger, Sun, Texas Advanced Computing Center (433.20 teraflop/s)
• Dawn, IBM, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (415.70 teraflop/s)
• JUROPA, Bull SA, Forschungszentrum Juelich (274.80 teraflop/s)
IBM says it has developed a way to use one of its supercomputers to improve diagnosis and treatment of the widespread bone disease osteoporosis.
IBM Zurich Research Laboratory and the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (also known as ETH Zurich) utilized an IBM supercomputer to develop a method of early diagnosis that they say trumps the current approach to measuring bone mass density, the computer company announced Monday.
According to the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, the current most widely recognized bone mass density test is conducted by a dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry, or DXA. However, the test cannot measure the spongy inner microstructure of the bone.
This digital image produced by the Blue Gene Supercomputer shows the strain on a healthy 5x5x5 millimeter human vertebra. The areas in blue support a higher strain and weaker parts are shown in red.
(Credit: IBM Zurich Research Laboratory )IBM's new method will combine density measurements with a mechanical analysis of the inner-bone structure. By using large-scale parallel simulations and testing real bone, researchers created a heat map of bone strain that can show physicians the likely weight load that would cause a bone to break and where the fracture would occur.
The teams used an 8-rack Blue Gene/L Supercomputer to conduct the simulations. IBM said the computer takes just 20 minutes to generate 90 gigabytes of output data. Currently, IBM dominates the supercomputer world, and makes 210 of the top 500 supercomputer systems.
While supercomputers aren't currently readily available to physicians, IBM's Zurich lab says that 10 years from now the performance of a supercomputer should be available on a desktop system, and the technology will become a staple in diagnosing the bone density-deteriorating disease.
IBM Zurich and ETH Zurich said the labs have future plans to use supercomputer technology to simulate the formation of fractures for individual patients with osteoporosis. The disease affects 75 million people around the world, according to the International Osteoporosis Foundation.
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