Posted on 09/05/2024 12:09:03 PM PDT by Red Badger
"Rhea," NOAA's new high-performance computer will join the HPC Hera supercomputer, which is currently operating at the NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center in Fairmont, W.V. Photo courtesy of NOAA Sept. 3 (UPI) -- A new $100 million high-performance computer system will advance research and development efforts by NOAA on a number of scientific and weather-related tasks, the federal government announced Tuesday.
The high-performance computer called "Rhea" will advance NOAA research on weather, climate, and ocean and ecosystem prediction at its new modular facility in Fairmont, W.Va., at NOAA's Environmental Security Computing Center, currently home of the Hera HPC supercomputer.
NOAA's Rhea computer was "named for the Greek goddess and mother of gods," the agency said.
"The Rhea high-performance computer system adds needed computing capacity for NOAA to expand critical research that supports the nation's climate resilience," Assistant Secretary of Commerce Michael C. Morgan wrote Tuesday in a news release.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, is a scientific and regulatory agency under the U.S. Department of Commerce that is tasked with a wide range of U.S. weather and other science-related duties.
Morgan says the new computer system "will strengthen NOAA's exploration and application of artificial intelligence and machine-learning capabilities," which he added will "ultimately improve weather, ocean and climate forecasting, ecosystem modeling and the use of satellite Earth observations to understand climate changes."
The Commerce Department relayed how the new $100 million state-of-the-art high-performance computer system was paid for by funding provided in President Joe Biden's $1.2 trillion bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act.
Funding for Rhea was awarded to General Dynamics Information Technology, a global technology company with headquarters in Falls Church, Va., that delivers a wide-range of services "to every major agency across the U.S. government, defense and intelligence community," according to GDIT.
The new computing capacity will also be used for weather and climate model development to improve drought, flood and wildfire prediction and forecasting. It will add about eight petaflops of computing speed and capacity to NOAA's existing capacity of 35 petaflops, bumping the total to 43 petaflops.
A petaflop is one thousand trillion, or one quadrillion, operations per second, and represents an extremely fast computing speed for a single machine, according to NOAA officials.
The agency said Rhea features graphics processing units that "will accelerate NOAA's use of AI/ML in a range of areas," which includes monitoring marine life species, weather forecasting and modeling of specific "environmental phenomena" such as atmospheric rivers, fire weather and hurricane intensification using Earth observations.
An NOAA official claims the investment in higher-performance computing "will result in significant scientific and economic impacts."
"The computer's installation at the NOAA Environmental Security Computing Center in West Virginia will strengthen NOAA's partnership with the West Virginia High Technology Foundation, which is committed to building a stronger, more diverse economy for the region," Zachary Goldstein, NOAA Chief Information Officer and director of High Performance Computing, said.
Rhea, once actively online, will be part of NOAA's Research and Development High Performance Computing System, which include the likes of four other research and development HPC centers in Boulder, Colo.; Princeton, N.J.; Oak Ridge, Tenn., and on the campus of Mississippi State University in Starkville.
According to NOAA, its Research and Development High-Performance Computing System already has helped the agency improve weather forecasting and climate projections.
By increasing the warning times for hurricanes, tornadoes and tsunamis, HPC "has helped researchers better understand ocean dynamics, our changing climate and its impacts and supported private enterprise with research to inform economic decision making."
I’m a ham radio guy. On my radios, I have all the NOAA weather channels programmed in. One thing I noticed is that the robotic voice never says weather now. It’s always CLIMATE.
just hook it up to a weather rope. weather ropes never lie. of course they are prone to disappearing in a hurricane or typhoon. then you’re on your own.
Well...won’t this fix that? They will be able to predict “rain” to the minute!.../s
“Climate is what you expect. Weather is what you get.” - Robert Heinlein.............
Looks like we’re going to have a couple of hours of rainy climate ahead of the cold front, and then the climate will be turning clear and breezy with winds out of the North. Tonight’s climate will be clear with overnight lows in the 40’s.
Back in the early 1990’s I was interning at the NOAA weather station in San Antonio and was the voice of the weather.
Won’t Gorebal Warning be deeply impacted by all of the new kWs to be burned?
I need Hail Warnings.
Garbage in, garbage out. Hopefully that’s not the case here, but if the programmers are “woke,” that’s what we’ll get.
“Tell me it’s Climate Change, Hal.”
Interesting. Because those are two different things.
Climate is what you expect.
Weather is what you get.
My wife and I went to a National Weather Service presentation at the Boston Museum of Science back in the early to mid-nineties, and they said in five years they were going to be able to predict the weather two weeks out down to the city block level.
And here we are.
Ah...you beat me to it!
GMTA!..................
A computer named ‘Rhea’..............
Funding for Rhea was awarded to... ‘General Dynamics Information Technology’,.... a Global technology company.
We live in a ‘global information economy’ controlled by a handful of people....
Possibility of rain with intermittent sunshine.
(There I fixed the NOAA computer.)
So the hurricane season forecasts can be even more incorrect than they are this year.
When we were kids (there were six in my family) my mother got so angry at us because I mixed paint by number paint in some brass artifact she had and I wouldn’t own up to it.
My poor mother.
She had us all lined up, strapped us with the belt, and I still wouldn’t own up, and she said “That’s it. I can’t handle this anymore. I am sending you all to the orphanage.”
And she picked up the phone and dialed the number, and we are all tearfully pleading “Mooooom! Don’t send us to the orphanage!!!!”
To this day I always wondered if she called that number back in the Sixties that said:
“The time is 9:47 AM and the temperature is 69 degrees Fahrenheit...”
My guess is that this $100,000,000 AI computer won't even do what it's supposed to do... add credibility to the global warming hoax. The reason they need AI is that the DEI programmers haven't been able to do that either. So, the plan is to replace them with a computer that can program itself.
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