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Blue Sky 1
Tue Dec 21, 2004
Listen in RealAudio 
Blue Sky is not just a nice thing to have over your head, it is also one of the world’s
fastest computers. Hi, I’m Bryan Yeaton for The Weather Notebook. I got the chance to
talk with Jeff Kuehn, one of the folks responsible for this powerful machine at the
National Center for Atmospheric research In Boulder, Colo.
BY: How big is it (Blue Sky) size-wise, and what can it do, computationally?
JK: Size-wise, it basically looks like … a set of 50 very, very large refrigerators-sized
cabinets. Computationally, that largest machine is capable of about 4 trillion floating
point operations per second—a floating point operation being an addition or
multiplication of two 15-digit numbers. So, in terms of peak capability, it’s very, very
fast.
It’s not our only machine, though. We actually have several others, and in aggregate,
our facility is one of the largest in the world.
BY: One of the things Kuehn has been working on with Blue Sky, are climate models of
global warming, from the International Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC.
BY: How long will that take?
JK: Over 3 million hours. I’m kind of a speed junkie. And the most interesting thing for
me is to be able to take one of these models and see just how fast we can get it to
perform. The benchmark number for the IPCC models is the number of years that can
simulate in an actual day.
BY: Current efforts have us simulating somewhere between 17 and 18 years per day.
So, if we need to simulate 100, 250, 1,000 years worth of climate, you can see how
long these kinds of simulations can take.
Tomorrow, we go into the belly of the beast. The Weather Notebook is a program of the
Mount Washington Observatory, funded by Subaru of America.
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