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| NCCS, NERSC Contribute to 2007 Nobel Peace Prize |
| The IBM pSeries Cheetah supercomputer at the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) at ORNL and supercomputers at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center at LBNL provided more than half of the simulation data for the joint DOE/NSF data contribution to the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). This year the IPCC—a group of more than 2,000 scientists and policy experts—shares the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change," according to the Nobel announcement. |
| "Access to DOE leadership-class, high-performance computing assets at NERSC and ORNL significantly improved model simulations," said atmospheric scientist Dr. Lawrence Buja of the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), an NSF center. "These computers made it possible to run more realistic physical processes at higher resolutions, with more ensemble members, and longer historical validation simulations. We simply couldn't have done this without the strong DOE/NSF interagency partnership." |
| The Cheetah IPCC simulations were led by computational scientist Dr. John B. Drake of ORNL and Dr. Buja. The runs occupied half of Cheetah's processors for the better part of a year and required the efforts of five ORNL staff members to help develop the model and two dozen NCCS staff members to move enormous amounts of simulation data. "Having the computer resources at ORNL made it possible to carry out a more comprehensive and detailed study than ever before," Dr. Drake says. "This improved the level of certainty for some of the conclusions in the IPCC reports and enabled breakthroughs to new climate results such as the prediction of regional heat waves." |
| At NERSC, climate runs began in the late 1990s with the Parallel Climate Model (PCM). Results from these runs were stored in the PCM database at NERSC, the first truly public database for distributing climate data. "It is fair to say that without the PCM runs, made largely at NERSC in the late 1990s through 2002, the U.S. modeling effort would have not been the major factor it is in the IPCC report," said Dr. Michael Wehner, who managed the PCM database at the time. Since 2002, the IPCC project has used more than 8.6 million processor hours at NERSC, of which 2.8 million were run in 2004 and 2.5 million in 2006. |
| The result of the runs at ORNL, NERSC, and NCAR is "the largest set of publicly available climate change simulations with the Community Climate System Model and Parallel Climate Model that we are aware of anywhere in the world," according to the project team. |
