Supercomputer tackles climate change

[Nostalgia]

IT IS a descendant of IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer which famously defeated world champion and chess genius Garry Kasparov.

Now Blue Ice, Swansea University’s ultra-powerful but considerably slimmed down “new generation” IBM supercomputer, is about to try saving the planet.

Blue Ice, the first supercomputer in Wales dedicated to tackling climate change, was switched on yesterday in front of 200 guests at the university’s Mike Barnsley Centre for Climate Research.

The new research unit, based at a university satellite centre at Technium Pembrokeshire in Pembroke Dock, is named after the inspirational Swansea University professor and former pro-vice chancellor Mike Barnsley, who died last year aged 47.

The computer, the latest from the series of IBM “blue” series, one of the first of which defeated Kasparov in 1997, can now make two trillion calculations per second.

Surrounded by a spectacular visualisation suite, the surprisingly small supercomputer will try to help Welsh scientists understand one of the most worrying modern climate trends: the thinning of polar ice sheets.

Pictures of polar bears adrift on melting ice floes have sparked alarm across the world.

Tavi Murray, Professor of Glaciology at Swansea University’s School of the Environment and Society, has as his primary area of interest the study of fast flowing glaciers and ice streams as well as glacier instabilities.

In particular, her work in these areas aims to predict future contribution from glaciers and melting ice sheets to sea-level rise and, in turn, the repercussions that such sea-level rises will have on all of us.

Prof Murray said: “With many glaciers experiencing rapid thinning, time is of the essence in discovering the effects of these drastic changes.

“This is where Blue Ice can help. Its main system has 640 cores and a peak performance of 6.8 Teraflops [an industry-recognised measure of high performance computing where ‘Tera’ equals 1,012 and ‘flops’ stands for floating point operations per second], while its neighbouring cell based development platform provides an additional 3.6 Teraflops performance.”

One of the most powerful supercomputers in Wales, Blue Ice will allow its users to perform calculations in a fraction of the time needed by a regular computer.

It will allow researchers to convert vast amounts of scientific data on temperatures in thousands of locations into meaningful images, leading to better interpretation of the results.

Dr Murray added: “This visualisation aspect, together with implementation and ongoing support of Blue Ice, is the result of a collaboration with OCF, one of the UK’s premier High Performance Computing (HPC) integrators.”

According to the university, the icing on the cake is that the computer’s operation has also been specifically designed to be energy efficient.

Blue Ice is housed in a new “green” data centre and boasts energy efficient computer processing units which provide high performance computing within a small carbon footprint.

A university spokeswoman said: “Indeed, were Blue Ice to feature in the ‘Green 500 List’ announced by The Green500.org in June 2008, it would rank as the most energy-efficient supercomputer in Wales.

“This ground-breaking facility has been made possible thanks to an increasingly effective collaboration between computer giant IBM and Swansea University’s Institute of Innovation (IN2).”

Swansea University’s Institute of Life Science (ILS), a £52m collaboration between the university’s School of Medicine, IBM and the Welsh Assembly Government, already has a dedicated IBM-built supercomputer, Blue C.

Another of the famous blue series (after IBM’s nickname “Big Blue”), Blue C has been plotting ways to help out-think the lethal bird flu strain which sparked fears of a killer pandemic in 2006.

Blue C is being used to work out the likely path of any lethal strain of bird flu in Britain by analysing billions of combinations of possible bird flight patterns and movements.

The computer can work out in seconds what other machines may take days or even weeks to do.

It will allow the Government and scientists to predict where bird flu will appear and where to put measures in place to cull birds or other appropriate actions.

More than 130 people have died from the H5N1 strain of bird flu in the past few years, mainly in places like China, Thailand and Vietnam. But those who have died have had close contact with infected birds.

However, the “doomsday scenario” worrying medical experts is a so-called re-combination event: a melding together of deadly bird flu with ordinary human flu.

The potentially deadly new strain, which would spread quickly from person to person, could happen if someone with human influenza became infected with bird flu and the two strains mutated to form one.

Britain is now one of 13 EU countries which have wild birds infected with the virus.

Dr Mike Gravenor, who is leading the Blue C team, said: “The more infected birds we have, the more chance there is of a re-combination event.”

Blue C is trying to work out exactly where any such new strain would spread to, so medical resources could be concentrated there, forming a “virus firebreak”.

Dr Gravenor said: “Control of the bird population is effectively the front line in any battle against a human form of the virus.

“The Blue C is the key because it allows us to make sense of vast amounts of data relating to bird premises and bird movements.”

http://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/wa...1466-22160506/

So,

IF Humans are responsible for Global Warming, why was it 2 degrees warming 4000 BC?