Some data center operators take their chances with floods

Arielle Emmett in Computerworld: Given the dire warnings about climate change, some business leaders and IT professionals are pondering this question: How should data center managers handle the crop of so-called 100- and even 500-year storms, coastal floods and other ecological disasters that climatologists predict are heading our way?

Some experts suggest that managers of mission-critical data centers simply need to harden their existing facilities, other observers say data centers need to be moved to higher ground, and a third group advises data center managers to pursue both strategies.

One thing is certain, experts say: Few IT organizations -- even those that suffered or narrowly escaped damage during recent major storms -- are thinking long term. Most IT leaders are, if anything, taking the path of least resistance and least expense.

For instance, the response to Hurricane Sandy, on the East Coast at least, "is nothing more than hardening existing data centers," says Peter Sacco, founder and president of PTS Data Center Solutions, a data center design and management consultancy in Franklin Lakes, N.J. On the other hand, he says, the fact that most computers are networked these days de-emphasizes "the importance of any single data center."

Internap, an IT infrastructure colocation company, is strengthening its most at-risk facilities, including the building at 75 Broad St. in lower Manhattan that flooded after Sandy hit. During the storm, fuel pumps shut down and Internap switched to a 1,200-gallon reserve fuel tank on a higher floor to keep servers running....

Data center racks,shot by Lgate74, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license

Advanced computing system provides large-scale capacity to examine arctic sea-ice variations, tropical hurricane formation

University at Albany News Center: A new, highly sophisticated computing system will allow several new University at Albany Atmospheric Scientists to conduct large-scale research of arctic sea-ice variations, tropical hurricane formations and structure, and boundary layer weather conditions of large operational wind farms.   The computing system, which combines servers and storage into a ‘cluster,’ represents the University’s most powerful and architecturally advanced supercomputer. 

UAlbany’s Department of Atmospheric and Environmental Sciences (DAES) and the Office of Information Technology Services ((ITS) acquired the supercomputer, aided in part by a $35,000 grant from the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority (NYSERDA). The cluster provides the department with the computing capability to conduct large-scale atmospheric modeling projects. UAlbany Atmospheric Sciences faculty members will utilize the cluster for the following research:

• Understand how weather and climate works on the scales at which humans and ecosystems are affected ... The computational power provided by SNOW will allow for detailed simulation of individual cloud features, such as lake-effect snow bands. It will also offer long simulations that characterize the mechanisms of regional climate change such as the effect of snow-loss over mountains on regional weather and hydrology. 
• Study the impacts of changing polar sea ice on weather and climate, and implement polar sea ice forecasting...
• Investigate the causes of variability in hurricane structure, intensity and frequency using a hierarchy of different modeling approaches ...
• Conduct numerical simulations using Weather Research and Forecasting (WRF) models to explore the impact of wind farms on local climates...

A wind farm in Texas, shot by Leaflet, Wikimedia Commons, public domain

Playing out future flooding scenarios

Sandor Gyarmati in the Delta Optimist (British Columbia): A new video game being developed at UBC will give Delta students the chance to become city planners dealing with the implications of global warming and a rising sea level.

Future Delta 2.0 is a video game project led by Dr. Stephen Sheppard at UBC and Dr. Aleksandra Dulic of UBC-Okanagan. Having elements similar the interactive city-building game Sim City, the game will enable players to become city planners dealing with the implications of global warming and sea level rise.

"The video game is initially, at least, for high school kids," said Sheppard, director of UBC's Collaborative for Advanced Landscape Planning (CALP). "Working with some schools in Delta, it's very early in the life of this project. We were funded to work on a climate change video game that was to be a place-based game in Delta, so Delta people and Delta school kids would play the game and they would see places they know and recognize.

"It would also deal with other kinds of issues, including sea level rise and its effects on farming, and also how people respond in terms of community energy and renewable energy, cutting their carbon footprints and what their community would look like. It's to be a fun game that's educational for students who are studying climate change in their curriculum and in sciences classes. It would make it meaningful for them but also fun," he explained....

A blue heron in Vancouver, shot by Eugene Sit, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Supercomputers used to help predict future extreme climate changes in the US

RedOrbit: With the recent history of extreme droughts and super storms, many are wondering what the future holds for the climate of the eastern United States. New research from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, has taken the guesswork out of it. The results of this study, published in a recent issue of Environmental Research Letters, show that the region will be hotter and wetter in the future.

The research team consisting of Joshua Fu, a civil and environmental engineering professor, and Yang Gao, a graduate research assistant created a “climate crystal ball,” a set of precise scales of cities that predict high-resolution climate changes almost 50 years into the future.

The researchers combined high-resolution topography, land use information and climate modeling using the power of UT’s Kraken and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) Jaguar, now called the Titan, which is the fastest supercomputer in the world. They used dynamic downscaling – which allowed the researchers to develop climate scales as small as four square kilometers – to develop climate model results.

“Instead of studying regions, which is not useful when examining extreme weather, dynamical downscaling allows us to study small areas such as cities with a fine resolution,” said Fu, who is also a professor within the UT-ORNL Bredesen Center for Interdisciplinary Research and Graduate Education.

...The team found that heat waves would become more severe throughout the eastern portion of the country by comparing present climate to future predictions, with the Northeast and Midwest experiencing a greater increase in heat waves than the Southeast. The Southeast will almost equalize the temperatures between the future North and current South according to the model....

Heat shimmering from an air strip, USAF photo

Supercomputer will help researchers map climate change down to the local level

Stephen P. Nash in the Washington Post:  An advance guard of 18-wheelers is scheduled to roll into a business park in Cheyenne, Wyo., this week to unload components of a supercomputer called Yellowstone. This 1.5-quadrillion-calculations-per-second crystal ball will model future climate and forecast extreme weather.

“It’s a big deal,” said climate scientist Linda Mearns of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Yellowstone will help researchers calculate climate change on a regional, rather than continental, scale. With a better grasp of how warming may affect local water resources, endangered species and extreme winds, local and state governments will be able to plan more effectively.

....As climate models become more complex and detailed, limited computing power bottlenecks the research. Broad-brush models use less power, but they often cannot consider details that drive local climate, such as complex coastlines or the mountain ranges and valleys that affect rainfall. Researchers refer to this as a problem of “model resolution.”

“If you have an old digital camera that doesn’t have as many megapixels as a new one, you want to get that [new] camera because it takes sharper pictures, and you can store a lot more pictures on it,” said Richard Loft, a director in the computing lab at NCAR. “It’s the same thing with Yellowstone. We’ve increased our ability to generate more-detailed pictures of the climate system, so we get a sharper, crisper view of things.”

...Yellowstone will be able to generate climate projections for seven-square-mile “pixels,” instead of the 60-square-mile units typically in use now. “We’ve already had the model resolution to confirm the warming of the planet but not to talk about the winners and losers at the regional scale,” Loft said...

Albert Bierstadt's 1881 painting, Yellowstone Falls

NCAR selects IBM for key components of new supercomputing center

NCAR & UCAR News Center: The National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) today announced that IBM will install critical components of a petascale supercomputing system at the new NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center (NWSC). The company was selected following a competitive open procurement process.

The IBM components consist of a massive central resource for file and data storage, a high performance computational cluster, and a resource for visualizing the data.

The new system, named Yellowstone, runs on an IBM iDataPlex and is expected to be delivered to the NWSC early next year. It will be the new facility’s inaugural system. Once installed, the system will go through a testing period before being made fully available for scientific research in the summer of 2012.

Yellowstone is expected to deliver 1.6 petaflops performance, or nearly 30 times the capacity of the system currently in use at NCAR’s Mesa Laboratory in Boulder, known as bluefire. Petaflops refers to a machine’s ability to perform one quadrillion calculations, called floating point operations (FLOPS), per second.

Scientists will use these advanced computing resources to understand complex processes in the atmosphere and throughout the Earth system, and to accelerate research into climate change, severe weather, geomagnetic storms, carbon sequestration, aviation safety, wildfires, and other critical geoscience topics...

The building housing the NCAR-Wyoming Supercomputing Center in Cheyenne, Wyoming, was completed in the summer of 2011. (©UCAR. Photo by Carlye Calvin.

Supercomputers may help predict climate changes locally

Renee Schoof in the Miami Herald via McClatchy Newspapers: Even a century ago, scientists working out equations on paper understood that gases in the atmosphere absorbed and emitted energy, keeping Earth from being a ball of ice. Today they use supercomputers to make increasingly refined predictions about how the Earth's climate will change. The new efforts take the question from global to local scale. Nations, states and communities have lots of climate-related questions: Should they divert water from one area to another? Build higher sea walls? Store and manage water the way Israel does today? Plan for many more 100-degree days in future summers?

"We can't answer those questions with the capabilities we have today. That's why we're using supercomputers to push the limits of what we understand and how well we can predict," said James Kinter. He's a professor in the climate dynamics Ph.D. program at George Mason University in Virginia and the director of the Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies. "We know with a high degree of certainty that the planet is warming up, and so just on average every place is going to be warmer," Kinter said. "But nobody lives on the average."

...As computers improve, climate scientists can make increasingly better models... The National Center for Atmospheric Research today hosts one of the world's top computers for climate models, used by Kinter's group and many other scientists. Next year a better computer will open in a new facility in Cheyenne, Wyo. The current site couldn't house the next generation of computing, Buja said.

National Center for Atmospheric Research and Department of Energy scientists' models were major contributions to the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Buja said they now were finishing models for the next international review of climate science, due in 2014. "There's a huge economic cost of responding to this," Buja said. "We need to make sure we're presenting as convincing a case as we can."...

Climate models are systems of differential equations based on the basic laws of physics, fluid motion, and chemistry. To “run” a model, scientists divide the planet into a 3-dimensional grid, apply the basic equations, and evaluate the results. Atmospheric models calculate winds, heat transfer, radiation, relative humidity, and surface hydrology within each grid and evaluate interactions with neighboring points. From NOAA

New website makes California climate change science available to all

Ann Brody Guy in the UC Berkeley News Center: Extensive climate change research being conducted at California universities and research centers is now openly available through a public website developed at the University of California, Berkeley. The announcement was made today (Tuesday, June 7) by the California Energy Commission (CEC) and the California Natural Resources Agency, the sponsoring state agencies.

The website, Cal-Adapt.org, went live today and has a variety of features tailored for different types of users, including members of the general public concerned about their neighborhood or region; decision-makers, such as city planners and resource managers; and experts who want to examine data.

The information on the website comes from peer-reviewed climate change research funded by the CEC’s Public Interest Energy Research (PIER) program, which funds and oversees the Cal-Adapt website project. The site displays the research data in a variety of climate change-related scenarios and in map format, modeling various projections – such as changes in snow pack, wildfire danger and temperature – through the end of the century.

“PIER-funded projects have produced enormous amounts of data and findings related to climate change and its impact on California, but until now the data from the research has been inaccessible to a larger audience,” said Kevin Koy, manager of the Geospatial Innovation Facility (GIF), the state-of-the-art mapping and geo-location center at UC Berkeley’s College of Natural Resources, where the Cal-Adapt website was developed. Koy is co-author, with the GIF team, of an article on the development of Cal-Adapt.org published earlier this week in the journal Photogrammetric Engineering & Remote Sensing.

Koy said that Cal-Adapt is primarily a planning tool intended to benefit local climate adaption efforts, and is also designed for use by the general public. To explore climate projections, users can search specific California locations or click on an interactive map….

The Cal-Adapt website displays projected temperature changes in area of California, including Lake Tahoe (from the UC Berkeley website)

NERSC supercomputing center breaks the petaflops barrier

Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory: The Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), already one of the world’s leading centers for scientific productivity, is now home to the fifth most powerful supercomputer in the world and the second most powerful in the United States, according to the latest edition of the TOP500 list, the definitive ranking of the world’s top computers.

NERSC's newest supercomputer, a 153,408 processor-core Cray XE6 system, posted a performance of 1.05 petaflops (quadrillions of calculations per second) running the Linpack benchmark. In keeping with NERSC's tradition of naming computers for renowned scientists, the system is named Hopper in honor of Admiral Grace Hopper, a pioneer in software development and programming languages. The system, installed d in September 2010, is funded by DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research.

Established in 1974, NERSC is located at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California and provides computing systems and services to more than 3,000 researchers supported by the Department of Energy (DOE). NERSC’s users, located at universities, national laboratories, and other research institutions around the country, report producing more than 1,500 scientific publications each year as a result of calculations run at NERSC.

"While we are elated to have entered the petascale performance arena, we are especially excited by the computational science potential offered by Hopper," said Kathy Yelick, Director of the NERSC Division and Associate Laboratory Director of Computing Sciences at Berkeley Lab. "We selected Cray as the system vendor after a competitive procurement based in large part on how proposed systems performed running our application benchmarks. Now that the system is installed and operational, we will begin our acceptance testing in which we run some of the most demanding scientific applications to ensure that Hopper will meet the day-to-day demands of our users."

…The increasing power of supercomputers helps scientists study problems in greater detail and with greater accuracy, such as increasing the resolution of climate models and creating models of new materials with thousands of atoms….

Tool to aid companies with adaptation

EDP24 (UK): A free computer-based tool developed in Norfolk to help companies and organisations around the country adapt to the effects of climate change was launched yesterday. Thought to be the first of its kind in the country, the Climate Adaptation Tool (Cat) is designed to guide organisations through the process of adapting to the effects of inevitable climate change.

It has been put through its paces by infrastructure support company May Gurney during a trial and is also being used by Norfolk County Council. Rob Bellamy, climate adaptation officer for the Norfolk Climate Change Partnership and lead author of Cat, said: “Finding practical and positive solutions to climate change is very important if we are to effectively engage people. We are talking about adaptation rather than the causes of climate change and this tool basically sets out the business case for adaptation.

“For example, Norfolk has miles of roads which, in summer, could crack because of increasingly extreme heat. To help consider the best way to adapt to that, the options - for example different road dressings - can be put into the tool and it considers what is best using a range of factors.”

The Cat challenges the temptation to wait for risks to impact and then only react afterwards by providing a framework for long term sustainable decision making. Prof Douglas Crawford-Brown, adviser on climate change to Barack Obama, said: “Adaptation to climate change will require significant investments in the built environment of communities. These must be wise investments, which in turn require spending the money where it will reduce risks most significantly. “This adaptation toolkit provides the means for organisations to do just that, helping them focus limited investment resources where they will be needed most.”

…The tool is available via the www.norfolkambition.gov.uk website.

A signpost in Ringstead, Norfolk, shot by Uksignpix, Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license

NOAA supercomputer tapped for climate change research

Elizabeth Montalbano in InformationWeek: A new supercomputer operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) -- the most powerful one the agency has -- will soon be used exclusively for climate research.

The computer is housed at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) at the University of Tennessee alongside the most powerful super computers from two other federal agencies -- the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation, he said. ORNL is the Department of Energy's largest science and energy lab.

Currently, Climate is the smallest of the agency supercomputers housed at ORNL. It will gain more power next summer with the addition of 22 XE6 cabinets with 721 teraflops of compute power, Bland said. Some of Climate's cabinets also will get an upgrade in late 2011 or early 2012, he said. Climate is part of a five-year, $215 million agreement between ORNL and NOAA.

ORNL has been the site of some of the earliest and most powerful supercomputers. In the mid-1990s, the INTEL Paragon -- one of the fastest, non-classified computers at the time -- was located there. NOAA's supercomputer work has focused traditionally on complex computational modeling to do weather forecasting, but the agency has been shifting its focus to use supercomputers to predicting climate change.

Recently, the agency's use of supercomputers to general 3D models garnered attention when it was used to predict the trajectory of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico….

A photo of ORNL's CrayXT5 Jaguar supercomputer