Forced Green

For you futurists, geeks and of course, you greenies……… look at this!

Supercomputers Break Petaflop Barrier, Transforming Science By Betsy Mason
A new crop of supercomputers is breaking down the petaflop speed barrier, pushing
high-performance computing into a new realm that could change science more profoundl
than at any time since Galileo, leading researchers say.

When the Top 500 list of the world’s fastest supercomputers was announced at the
international supercomputing conference in Austin, Texas, on Monday, IBM had barely
managed to cling to the top spot, fending off a challenge from Cray. But both competitors
broke petaflop speeds, performing 1.105 and 1.059 quadrillion floating-point calculations
per second, the first two computers to do so.

These computers aren’t just faster than those they pushed further down the list, they
will enable a new class of science that wasn’t possible before. As recently described in
Wired magazine, these massive number crunchers will push simulation to the forefront of
science.

Scientists will be able to run new and vastly more accurate models of complex phenomena:
Climate models will have dramatically higher resolution and accuracy, new materials for
efficient energy transmission will be developed and simulations of scramjet engines will
reach a new level of complexity.

“The scientific method has changed for the first time since Galileo invented the
telescope (in 1609),” said computer scientist Mark Seager of Lawrence Livermore National
Laboratory.

Supercomputing has made huge advances over the last decade or so, gradually packing on
the ability to handle more and more data points in increasingly complex ways. It has
enabled scientists to test theories, design experiments and predict outcomes as never
before. But now, the new class of petaflop-scale machines is poised to bring about major
qualitative changes in the way science is done.

“The new capability allows you to do fundamentally new physics and tackle new problems,”
said Thomas Zacharia, who heads up computer science at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in
Tennessee, home of the second place Cray XT5 Jaguar supercomputer. “And it will
accelerate the transition from basic research to applied technology.”

Breaking the petaflop barrier, a feat that seemed astronomical just two years ago, won’t
just allow faster computations. These computers will enable entirely new types of science
that couldn’t have been done before. This new generation of petascale machines will move
scientific simulation beyond just supporting the two main branches of science, theory and
experimentation, and into the foreground. Instead of just hypotheses being tested with
experiments and observations, large-scale extrapolation and prediction of things we can’t
observe or that would be impractical for an experiment, will become central to many
scientific endeavors.

“It’s getting to the point where simulation is actually the third branch of science,”
Seager said. “We say that nature is always the arbiter of truth, but it turns out our
ability to observe nature is fundamentally limited.”

Source: Wired Science

This gives me goosebumps at just the thought of the potential!

We Americans plug in, text, log on, tune in (tv) and tune out (music). We use
13 times the power than just 60 years ago. Electricity is truly the life blood
of the U.S. Economy. Back in 2003, New York and surrounding areas really realized
how important electricity is. 50 million folks lost their power in minutes.

Building a national grid may be on top of President Obama’s list of things to
do. One idea is a power network, modeled like the interstate road system
that was thought up by President Eisenhower. Some folks feel that moving
power the same way could help out in the long run. This system would supercede
the 200,000 miles of power lines and 500 different owners.

Wind farms that have been cropping up everywhere need to have transmission lines
to the surrounding cities, towns, and villages. The same is true for solar, Read more…

Austrailia is working on a desalination plant due to the water shortage they are
experiencing.

Perth, Western Australia, is considered the most remote city on the planet. And
one thing they are running out of, like much of drought declared Australia, is
fresh drinking water.

They are currently working on a plan to cut the amount of energy it takes to
run it. They have considered using the wind. There is a new alternative that is
being looked at by inventor Alan Burns. He teamed up with Seapower Pacific Read more…

T. Boone Pickens is delaying his plans to build the world’s largest wind farm, according
to The Arizona Republic, which cited his remarks at a conference on Tuesday in Phoenix.

The Texas oilman, who has created a stir by his endorsement of wind power as part of a
national strategy to reduce dependence on foreign oil, cited the fall in natural gas
prices, a competing source of electricity generation, as a deterrent.

Pickens has leased hundreds of thousands of acres for a giant wind farm in West Texas,
where he plans to erect 2,700 turbines and produce energy for urban areas such as Dallas
and Fort Worth. Read more…

This is a guest article focused on the environmental effects of domestic oil
refinery use from Mesothelioma.com, a leading web resource for information about
mesothelioma cancer and its various causes.

CFCs and Fossil Fuels Have Short, Long Tail Effects

Often when considering the environmental hazards presented by human behavior, we fail to
see further than the direct effect on our planet. However, if we examine further, we can
gather that our behavior is affecting not only the earth we live on but also the general
human condition. There are essentially two levels to the damage posed by destructive
environmental actions. Let’s examine each of them in depth for a better comprehension of
this hazard.

Read more…

A new study by scientists has determined that a type of rock found at or near
the surface in the Oman and other areas around the world could be harnessed to
soak up huge quantities of globe-warming carbon dioxide (CO2).

Geologist Peter Kelemen and geochemist Juerg Matter, both from Columbia University’s
Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory, made the discovery during field work in the Omani
desert, where they have worked for years.

Their studies show that the rock, known as peridotite, reacts naturally at Read more…