By Nick True

Executive Summary:

According to Wired (this is a link to my source article, go ahead, click it) the newest, fastest, most face-melting supercomputer known as Jaguar actually belongs to civilian science, not the military which usually dominates the work of ultra-fast supercomputing.  This computer achieves the great feat of computing at a staggering 1.79 petafops, or 1,759 trillion calculations per second.  This blows the previous fastest supercomputer out of the water which broke the petaflop barrier.  To put this in perspective, the computer you are reading this on probably runs at about 100 gigaflops, this means that jaguar does about 20,000 times more calculations per second than your computer

Background:

Since the 1970’s the fastest supercomputers in the world were used for nuclear explosion modeling.  The jaguar, however, is used for climate modeling.  This is significant because it represents a shift in what humanity is using its computation power; instead of modeling nuclear scenarios we are modeling climate.  This shift in our computational goals represents a larger shift in global trends, a shift away from using our scientific and technological resources war and instead using them for peace-time research.

What it means for the world and you:

The implication of this computer for weather and climate research is far reaching.  Alexis Madrigal of Wired writes:

This has great implications on how we use climate data and do climate research:

• We can now look at climate on a much more micro and intimate level.
• The more localized we can look weather and climate, the more accurate our models are.
• This not only has implications on our weather forecasting abilities, but also for our learning and research concerning climate change.
• Climatologists can use the terabytes of data collected from climate satellites to track individual occurrences of carbon emissions and even track man-made carbon as is moves throughout our atmosphere over days, months, or even years.

But, most of us are not interested in large-scale climate modeling, or don’t see it as affecting our personal lives.  This supercomputer, however, represents much more than just the standard progress of computational and technological power.  With jaguar our computational power is being used for peace-time research and scientific progress, not war-making capability.  This represents an essential shift that our culture is undertaking from being preoccupied with war and what threats us to larger and more peaceful goals.  As a culture, we are starting to shift away from being preoccupied and over-worried about what threatens us and starting to focus on what we can achieve.  This is a truly monumental change, and we are monumentally lucky to be a part of it.

Last Thoughts:

The future is upon us, we are living at the forefront of scientific and technological achievement and discovery.  With each passing month we are breaking boundaries of what we previously thought possible with computational power and data processing capabilities.  As our many models of the world become more complete and more capable, the more we will learn about our world, our reality, and possibly even ourselves.

Last Links/More Resources

Wired.com full article

Official National Center for Computational Sciences website explaining Jaguar

History of Supercomputing (Wikipedia)

Photo Credit- Wired Magazine Supercomputer Article