Isra-Mart srl:Department of Energy donates computing power to climate fight

www.isra-mart.com

Isra-Mart srl news:

The US Department of Energy (DoE) is donating time on its supercomputers for a variety of research projects, including clean tech developments and climate modelling.

The project, announced this week, will devote computing time for 57 projects chosen by the department. Energy secretary Steven Chu said the initiative will provide computational capacity equivalent to 135,000 quad core laptops.

Divided between academic and commercial entities, the projects will use almost 1.7 billion processor hours on two DoE supercomputers. One of the machines, the Cray XT5, is housed at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, while the other, IBM's Blue Gene/P, is owned by Argonne National Laboratory.

The word "donate" might be a little generous, given that many of the projects are led by research teams housed entirely at the labs that own the computers. For example, 25 million processor hours on Blue Gene/P go to a team of Argonne-based researchers exploring the design of next-generation nuclear reactors. Similarly, scientists at Oak Ridge are taking 30 million processor hours on the Cray XT to simulate multicomponent biomass systems for the production of cellulosic ethanol.

However, there are some research projects in other areas of government. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) will be taking 20 million hours on the Cray to model the Earth's ecosystem at a much higher resolution than current simulations used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Analysing areas of the earth at 25km resolution as opposed to 100km will enable researchers to simulate ocean eddies that would not have been possible otherwise, said the DoE.

The work runs parallel to the climateprediction.net project, a community grid-based programme that uses spare computing capacity on participating PCs to process parts of its simulation. It is analysing climate models stretching out to 2100.