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Can supercomputer
predict
‘Perfect Storm’
?
Defense Department arms
itself with world’s fourth-most powerful computer.
By Ken
Popovich
eWEEK
ZDNN
Hoping
to prevent maritime tragedies such as that depicted in “The Perfect
Storm,” the Department of Defense has armed itself with the world’s
fourth-most-powerful supercomputer in hopes of improving oceanic
forecasts for the Navy and commercial
shippers.
THE $18 MILLION IBM system,
code-named Blue Wave, is capable of processing 2 trillion calculations per
second (2
terraflops), according to officials with the Armonk, N.Y.,
company.
Powered by 1,336 copper-based Power 3 processors, the IBM RS/6000 SP
system also features 1.336 terabytes of RAM and 17 terabytes of hard-disk
memory.
“The benefits to DoD research and
development will be enormous, enabling substantive advances in the science
areas which are critical to the nation’s defense,” said Landry Bernard,
technical director of the Naval Oceanographic Office at the Stennis Space
Center in Mississippi, where the system is located.
“While its primary mission is doing oceanographic modeling,
it’s also going to be used in DoD research projects such as aircraft
design (and) simulating battlefields,” said Peter
Ungaro, IBM’s vice
president of scientific and technical computing.
The world's most powerful
computer
THE PERFECT
MODELS?
Utilizing its existing
computer models, the Navy will create the most detailed models of ocean
currents, waves and temperature ever constructed, officials said. Such
modeling can help improve the accuracy of maritime forecasts for both
Naval operations and commercial shipping.
The danger posed by rapidly changing weather was highlighted in
Sebastian Junger’s best-selling book “The Perfect Storm,” later made into
a movie. It recounts the tale of the Andrea Gail, a fishing vessel with a
six-man crew that was lost at sea when it got caught in an unexpectedly
massive storm that developed off New England in October 1991.
Improved computer models should provide more accurate
and earlier forecasts of potentially deadly weather.
The Pentagon purchased the machine as part of its
modernization program, the goal of which is to provide the military with
high-performance computing capability equal to or greater than that
available in the private sector and academic research centers.
Once solely the realm of government and university researchers,
supercomputers in recent years have been increasingly adopted in the
corporate world as businesses strive to keep up with the tremendous number
of electronic transactions spurred by the growth of the
Internet.
“When we first started with the
(RS/6000
SPs) about six years ago, 100 percent of those machines were
being shipped to scientific, technical computing customers,” said IBM’s
Ungaro. “Now we have over 10,000 IBM SP systems that we’ve installed
around the world, and approximately 70 percent of those are in the
commercial world. That’s been a huge growth for us.”
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