Oxford University’s Department of Atmospheric Oceanic Planetary Physics (Aopp) is planning to install a high-performance cluster to simulate historical climate conditions.
The Aopp system, funded by the EU’s Millennium project, aims to prove that 20th century climate change has not occurred naturally, as some claim.
Aopp is already engaged in a major climate prediction grid project with the BBC, using thousands of volunteered PCs to run a huge experiment to determine how world weather will behave in future.
The new Oxford University cluster will be powerful enough to run a thousand-year simulation in about two months, says project leader Hiro Yamazaki.
‘We estimate that the system will be able to run at six times higher resolution than the grid experiment, giving us more detail and accuracy,’ he said.
‘We will recreate the past to find out what the climate has been like, to look at its natural variability and see how things worked when the environment was not being forced by extra atmospheric carbon dioxide.’
The project is being supported by the Met Office, which is providing its climate modelling software to run the experiment. It will also supply specialist programming expertise.
The Millennium project experiment will be one of the first of its kind in the world to look at climate change in such depth, says Yamazaki.
Once operational the system will use 9TB of storage to house the data generated by the climate change experiment.
Cluster systems are becoming a favourite with university departments looking to get high-end computing capacities without having to spend large amounts of money, says Butler Group analyst Michael Azoff.
‘They are a lot cheaper than a proper supercomputer, because you can essentially take off-the-shelf components, tie them together and it will work,’ he said.
‘That has lowered the cost of entry into high-end computing, to an extent that universities are now often choosing them over traditional style machines.’
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