From the SkyNet Climatic department comes news of the upcoming climate-model-supercomputer hootenanny at the University of Illinois next week. What’s wrong with us letting supercomputers make decisions for us?
An international summit seeks to harness the power of supercomputers to make climate decisions
Organized and organized by NCSA and chaired by Professor of Atmospheric Sciences Kelvin Droegemeier, the summit’s long-term goal is kilometer-scale global resolution in Earth system modeling and climate projections.
National Center for Supercomputing Applications
The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and the Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences (CliMAS) will bring together more than 100 leading experts in climate, Earth System Modeling (ESM), computing and other sectors for the International Climate Computing Summit. at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from September 29 to October 2, 2024.
The summit will bring together an international group of authorities from academia, government, industry and non-profit organizations to examine the practicalities of designing specialized computing systems and modeling frameworks that support Earth system science research and climate projections using the global kilometer scale. resolution. In addition, it will address how the output of global high-resolution climate projections can be used – especially locally and regionally – to make decisions in areas such as economic and personal risk, health, infrastructure, food production, biodiversity, global geopolitical stability and more.
“Many groups around the world are pioneering high-resolution ESM, which when combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning is poised to transform our understanding of the global Earth system and improve our ability to project future climate states. This is one side of the coin, “said Kelvin K. Droegemeier, Professor of Atmospheric Sciences and Special Advisor to the Chancellor for Science and Policy at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “The other side, which was addressed at the summit, includes the computing environment needed to achieve this transformation. It does not exist, even with AI, but we believe it can be created if the international climate research community joins in a way that has never been done before. These efforts will not be replacing existing research strategies, but adding value, as well as opening up new educational opportunities and providing practitioners and stakeholders with the information they need to make decisions in all sectors of society.
The purpose of the climate summit is to bring together the international community to achieve a transformation milestone: providing information on the Earth’s climate system globally, with detailed regional weather forecast models through the use of sophisticated ESM at a global resolution of several kilometers combined with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Reliable and detailed information at this scale can strengthen timely climate decision-making at local and regional scales. Achieving this important goal requires computing capabilities and software frameworks beyond what is currently commercially available.
NCSA’s powerful supercomputing resources and team of experts are well equipped to tackle the challenges of climate change. For example, NCSA’s Blue Waters and iForge supercomputers hosted in the U. of I. help researchers model volcanic activity with real-time data to provide daily forecasts, and data from the Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE), a powerful collection of sources integrated digital power and services including supercomputers, visualization and storage systems, helping to create Amazonian “heartbeat” weather patterns for researchers. NCSA is poised to be a powerful asset in the fight against climate change.
“NCSA and the University of Illinois have a long history of collaborating with climate researchers to address the most challenging environmental questions,” said NCSA Director Bill Gropp. “Climate models of this scale require innovative high-performance computing resources designed for these problems. With a tradition of spreading and helping scientists use the latest technology, we are proud to sponsor this summit and show our commitment to helping decision makers deal with and plan for the conditions that climate uncertainty.
The Summit will bring 100+ invited participants from around the world to Champaign-Urbana from sectors including government, climate research, higher education, computer science, technology and industry. The public is invited to attend the summit free of charge, and all plenary sessions will be broadcast live globally during the summit. Registration for virtual attendance at the summit is available at this link.
The International Climate Computer Summit is sponsored by the National Science Foundation and organized by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Department of Climate, Meteorology & Atmospheric Sciences at the University of Illinois, NSF National Center for Atmospheric Research, University of Maryland, Berkeley Lab, Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, University of Utah and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.
Related
