Earth Simulator - StudentScholarships.org

Author: Drew Backley

Author: Drew Backley

On March 11 2002, Japanese engineers had built a computer so powerful that it could keep track of everything in the world all at once. It monitors rain forests in Bolivia, factories in Mexico, the Jet Stream, and the Gulf Stream. The Earth Simulator was designed to create a virtual twin of our home planet. Before this was made, the fastest computer in the world was an American military machine that can perform 7.2 trillion calculations per second. The simulator runs at more than 35 trillion calculations per second. The Earth Simulator was built in Yokohoma and is the size of four tennis courts. It is as powerful as the next twelve super computers in the world put together, and costs about $350 million. By plugging real-life climate data from satellites and ocean buoys into the Earth Simulator, researchers can create a computer model of the entire planet, then scroll it forward in time to see what will happen to our environment. Scientists have already completed a forecast of global ocean temperatures for the next 50 years, and a full set of climate predictions.

Instead of speculating about the possible environmental impact, the Kyoto accord, policymakers will be able to plug its parameters into the virtual Earth, then skip ahead 1,000 years to get a handle on what effect those policies might have. That kind of concrete data could revolutionize environmental science. Scientists feel, by digitally cloning the Earth, there is a high possibility of saving it. The Earth Simulator is especially suited for simulating complex linked systems. The climate is modelled together with water flow on the earth and models of the ocean. The issues of environmental changes has become more and more important during the past decade where pollution became a serious problem threatening the climate and the world we live in. The Earth Simulator consists of 640 super computers that are connected by a high-speed network. Each super computer contains eight vector processors with a peak performance of 8GFlops and a high-speed memory of 16GBytes. The total number of processors is 5120, which translates to a total of about 40TFlops peak performance, and total main memory of 10 Terra Bytes.

Earth Simulator's computing powers enable a 10km mesh grid capability at the equator that allows scientists to model and simulate far smaller clouds than previous super computers. This means more precise weather predictions and the ability to predict typhoon and cyclone paths. Within a few years, scientists expect Earth Simulator's advanced modeling and simulation capabilities to bear fruit. Because of the new super computer, scientists also expect to find new powerful ways to deal with anomalous events such as El Nino, global warming, and long-term changes in the earth's crust and interior.

I believe this is the greatest 21st century invention because this will help resolve problems in the climate and make it easier to determine the Earth's changes. Scientists have tried to solve these issues in the past. Now we can have more information than ever before.About the Author:

StudentScholarships.org is a scholarship database that has a big list of environmental scholarships.

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