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Forecasting the supercomputer future

Michael Kanellos CNET News

Published: 22 Aug 2003 17:15 BST

With a click of the mouse, Tadashi Watanabe set the seas in motion.

A fast-moving tendril of warm water began to curl through the gap between the islands of Okinawa and the rest of Japan, fuelling the region's notoriously rough waters on a dynamic, movie screen-sized, computerised map of the world.

Simultaneously, jet stream-influenced currents moved north from Spain to Great Britain, while ocean surface temperatures all along the US West Coast climbed rapidly. Soon, most of Asia was swimming in bathwater; a few seconds later, cold water began to inch away from the poles.

Watanabe, vice president of high performance computing at NEC, was showing a graphical recreation of changes in global ocean surface temperatures modelled by the Earth Simulator, the massive supercomputer created by the company and various agencies in the Japanese government.

His presentation at this week's Hot Chips conference at Stanford University also included a model of worldwide precipitation over a 16-day period. Huge swaths of clouds blanketed the southernmost and northernmost portions of the globe. Those two small clouds near Taiwan? They comprised a twin typhoon captured in the data swipe.

No wonder the US federal government is freaked out by this machine.

The value of many technological achievements -- Bluetooth, the Better Pasta Pot, Web sites that tout "my" personalisation services -- remains questionable, but it's tough to not to be awed by supercomputers. During World War II, researchers at Bletchley Park in England made a huge computer out of vacuum tubes to crack the supposedly unbreakable codes of the German Enigma machine.

Current supercomputers simulate nuclear explosions or study the airflow over Pringle's potato chips so they won't crumble or fly off the assembly line.