Tuesday, May 27, 2008

flops

According to this Nature news article, today's climate models are running on computers that calculate 10^13 operations a second.

Meanwhile, the fastest machines in the world are now approaching 10^15 ops/sec.

Today's climate models break down the earth's surface into roughly 100 km-on-a-side grids. If they could calculate 10^17 ops/sec, it says they could begin to approach the 10-kilometer scale or lower.

It seems fairly absurd that we are not dedicating the fastest machines in the world to calculating the future climate. Our survival could, literally, be at stake. What bigger priority could there possibly be?

1 comment:

MT said...

What bigger priority could there possibly be?

Those calculations figuring whether a mini-black-hole at the LHC would swallow the solar system and Earth with it. I think that kind of thing happens a lot faster than sea level rise too.