SCIENCE

‘Project Athena’ wraps up 6 months of sims, produces more than 900 TB of data

Few areas of science are currently hotter than climate. Attempts to understand humankind’s impact on our planet are occupying the front pages of countless newspapers and the minds of an increasingly informed public.

Climate change is likewise occupying a good percentage of processors on some of the world’s most powerful computing systems. Via simulation, researchers are beginning to comprehend the nuances of Earth’s climate and in turn helping policymakers understand the risks and prepare for a myriad of future scenarios.

As sophisticated as today’s climate models are, however, one critical component continues to hamper their effectiveness: clouds. Turns out those white puffs of water vapor hovering overhead are computationally complex, requiring resources that even today’s most powerful supercomputers are hard pressed to furnish.

A recent massive attempt to resolve the effects of clouds, Project Athena: High Resolution Global Climate Simulations, just wrapped up a 6-month intensive experimentation period that consumed 70 million CPU-hours on Athena, a Cray XT4 system currently ranked the 36th fastest computer in the world. Located at the National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS), a National Science Foundation (NSF)–funded research center managed by the University of Tennessee and located at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Athena is the smaller sister to Kraken, a Cray XT5 ranked as the world’s fourth fastest computer and likewise located at NICS.