email:  ckoplien@todaystmj4.com

Bluefire may revolutionize weather and climate prediction.

Bluefire is the name of the new supercomputer that will be used by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado.  The IBM Power 575 is one of the 25 most powerful and efficient computers in the world.

The computer can perform more than 76 trillion mathematical calculations per second.

That's 76,000,000,000,000.

In a second.

Wow.

It is through mathematical calculations that represent how the atmosphere behaves that computers project the type of weather that may be in our future.  Meteorologists rely on supercomputers to help make forecasts of everything from hurricanes to tornadoes to global climate change.

The computer programs designed to project global climate 100 years in the future are so complex that it takes about 2 weeks to run them.

With more calculations, being done faster, computer projections will become more accurate...and can be extended further into the future.

"We're going to triple our computing capability and actually burn a little less energy," said Tom Engel, a high-performance-computing expert at NCAR.

"This will let our researchers add more physics, add more chemistry, add more realism to the models," said Aaron Andersen, also an NCAR high-performance-computing expert.

Bluefire is made up of 11 closet-sized cabinets.

It will consume as much energy as 600 to 700 typical households.  However, that's significantly less energy than is consumed by NCAR's 2 current supercomputers.  The switch to the Bluefire should result in a net usage of 10% less energy.  A majority of that savings comes because Bluefire is cooled by cold liquid being carried through the computer through copper pipes.  Energy-hogging air-conditioning units have typically been used to cool these machines.

Why do we need a computer that will do 76 trillion calculations per second?  Because the atmosphere is simply that complicated.  And even with all of that computing power, the computer still cannot project the upcoming weather will 100% accuracy.  Again, the atmosphere is that complicated.

That's part of the reason I find it so fascinating.

There are some photos of Bluefire here...

http://www.ucar.edu/news/releases/2008/bluefirevisuals.shtml

http://www.cisl.ucar.edu/