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!

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…

The Global Seed Vault, opened this year on the far-northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, is a backup for the backups. It’s badly needed as around half the seed banks in developing countries are at risk from natural disasters or general instability.

Superman had it right: if you want to keep something safe, build a mountain fortress above the Arctic Circle. That’s the thinking — more or less — behind the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. Almost every nation keeps collections of native seeds so local crops can be replanted in case of an agricultural disaster. The Global Seed Vault, opened this year on the far-northern Norwegian island of Spitsbergen, is a backup for the backups. It’s badly needed — as many as half the seed banks in developing 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…

The Forests of the Earth are the lungs of the planet.  Today we need them more
than ever to breath in and absorb the excess emissions of carbon dioxide.

As CO2 levels in the atmosphere are rising, the forests of the world are falling.
20,000 square miles, the size of W. Virginia are lost every year due to
deforestation.  Which accounts for a forth of all excess green house emissions.

We need to reverse the cycle.  To replace the worlds disappearing forests, we
need to replant an area twice the size of Manhattan every single day.  Today’s Read more…

Since before Hurricane Ike came to town, we lost electricity.  The generator
has been my close friend for about 6 days.

My generator is a 6500 watt 13 hp JEWEL.  It takes 5 gallons of regular
gas and burns at a rate of 12 - 13 hours at a pop.  If you time it right,
you do not have to run out in the middle of the night to re-fill the tank.

I have learned alot about generators these days due to the parents going
kaput on Sunday night.  Theirs just simple wore out from years of use.  It
blew out the muffler, starting blowing oil, and then found copper windings Read more…