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Researchers at the University of California, Irvine, will use an IBM supercomputer to predict the impact of global warming on Earth up to 300 years into the future.
The supercomputer, called the Earth System Modeling Framework, 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 polar-ice melting and global warming—will affect future changes, according to IBM officials.
The ESMF supercomputer, which began operation last week, comprises seven pSeries 655 servers running on eight Power4+ servers and a 32-way p690, all clustered and running AIX. The storage system consists of x335 systems running Red Hats Linux operating system and Sistina Global File System, officials said.
The supercomputer can run at a maximum of 528 gigaflops. A gigaflop is a billion floating-point calculations per second.