eWEEK content and product recommendations are editorially independent. We may make money when you click on links to our partners. Learn More.
Researchers at the University of California at Irvine will use an IBM supercomputer to predict the impact of global warming on the Earth up to 300 years into the future.
The supercomputer, called the Earth System Modeling Facility, or ESMF, will enable researchers at the universitys Department of Earth System Science to simulate how pressures on the planets climate—from pollutants and chemicals to the melting of the polar ice and global warming—will affect future changes, according to officials with IBM, of Armonk, N.Y.
The ESMF supercomputer, which went into operation last week, comprises seven pSeries 655 servers running on eight Power4+ servers and a 32-way p690, all clustered together and running IBMs AIX Unix operating system. The storage system consists of x335 systems running Red Hat Inc.s Linux OS and Sistina Global File System, officials said Tuesday.
The supercomputer can run at a peak of 528 gigaflops. A gigaflop is a billion floating-point calculations per second.