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Forecasting Environmental Change

But just what does one use such a Herculean simulator for? Plans for the Earth Simulator project trace their origin to the 1997 Kyoto Global Warming Summit. The simulator was conceived as a national project launched in response to the close-up view of global environmental problems that hosting the summit brought to Japan. The grand plan was to create a supercomputer-based simulator that would generate a “Virtual Earth” showing the planet’s potential futures. The primary objects of forecast for the simulator are global-change phenomena such as climate change, abnormal weather conditions, movements of the Earth’s crust, and atmospheric pollution. It generates detailed forecasts on each of these types of phenomena in support of more accurate climate-policy formulation. In the field of climate change, the focus is on increasing the reliability of global-warming forecasting. Clarifying the extent and scope of actual and potential global warming is one of the top priorities of the Earth Simulator project. When we asked why such a mammoth supercomputer was required to forecast global warming, Kikuchi said: “Environmental change occurs through an enormously complex interaction of processes. A small change in one parameter often has a large impact somewhere else. That’s why forecasting the progress of global warming requires the simultaneous processing of extremely large amounts of data. If we were just talking about meteorological forecasting for Japan, for example, we wouldn’t need the Earth Simulator—other supercomputers would do; but when we expand to the level of all regions of the world, the parameters multiply and the task becomes so much more complex that other supercomputers fall far short of what is needed. When plans for the Earth Simulator were being drawn up, we had to ask just what kind of specs a supercomputer would require in order to handle climate-forecasting calculations for the entire planet. The answer was we would need about 1,000 times the capabilities of existing supercomputers. That was the target the development project started off with.” The company that took on this bold challenge was NEC. The global competition to achieve ever higher performance has served to push the technology to a higher level. Scientists work hard to win the honor of building the world’s top computer and thus enhance national pride.