My Computer is Bigger than Yours!
Friday, September 21st, 2007
By about 30 teraflops!
03/09/2007
I have already raved about JAMSTEC. Well, not only do they have a ship that can drill 7km beneath the sea floor into the Earth mantle, they also have the world’s biggest supercomputer, the Earth Simulator System. It outperforms the then Number 2 (the ASCI White system in the US) by a cool 30 teraflops.
Today we went to have a look at the thing (and the rather cool JAMSTEC facility, which includes a nice garden, tennis courts and a social room with a bar and BBQ-barrels out front; just in case you’re looking for a job…).
It’s not at all what I expected. The Worldcon-special tour was limited to 14 members, so I thought we’d get a look inside the labs or at the aquarium or something, but it soon transpired that I was the only biologist. And when we approached the icerink-like building in which the real beast was housed, the geeks in the group (i.e. all but me) started to salivate.
Here we have a building that is shielded against all sources of electromagnetic radiation (internal light is channeled through fibre-optic cables), radio waves, lightning and seismic vibration (believe it or not, the thing is built on rubber mats) and which houses a computer system that spans 4 tennis courts, connected by 1,800 miles of cables (83,000 in all).
In the main building, adjacent to the icerink, there is a museum and lecture hall. Our guide showed us a presentation of the Earth Simulator being put through its paces, running a climate simulation over the next eighty years. The changing colours made the hairs on my neck stand up. I don’t know whether this was one of the consensus models, but temperatures at the North Pole rose by over twelve degrees.
Visiting JAMSTEC was a fitting end to NIPPON2007, the 65th Science Fiction Worldcon and 46th Japan Science Fiction Convention. When we got back, they were already in the process of packing up. Boxes were stacked high, cables unthreaded and people were milling around various props as I made my way towards the bustling organisers’ offices and the Green Room at the end of the corridor, holding up my badge with the red ribbon at the entrance desk.
The atmosphere in the Green Room was different. An refuge from the frantic activity outside, people were clustering around long tables laden with plates and a long bar lined the wall, stacked with bottles and flanked by barrels full of cans of beer and chilled soft drinks. The Dead Dog Party is traditionally where the remaining booze is drunk down to the last drop: a final cheer raised to the organisers and volunteers, participants and fans who make worldcon what it is.
A cheer to past and future worldcons.
Denni