Albert Einstein once said it would be impossible to forecast the weather more than a few days in advance.
Then again, the genius scientist didn't have access to Raijin, one of the world's most powerful supercomputers now occupying an entire floor at the Australian National University.
The machine - named after the Japanese god of thunder and storms - can perform as many calculations in an hour as the entire earth's population could achieve using calculators for 20 years.
This extraordinary power will be a game changer for Australia's meteorologists, who need to crunch vast amounts of complex data faster than ever to improve weather forecasting in a changing climate.
"You could say that we in the climate science community have a need for speed," the Bureau of Meteorology's head Rob Vertessy said at the launch of the supercomputer on Wednesday.
"The simple fact is that supercomputer capacity is a major determinant of our success in this field, but it's always been a struggle to secure access to it."
Now, through a $50 million grant from the federal government and collaborative funding from CSIRO, ANU, BoM and Geoscience Australia, researchers have Raijin.
It's the largest in Australia, housed within long, glittering rows in the ANU's purpose-built National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) facility.
With the power of 30,000 ordinary laptops working together, Raijin performs quadrillions of tasks per second and lets scientists store millions of terabytes of data in a vast, digital cloud.
This means climate scientists can run weather models more frequently and at finer resolutions, and pinpoint severe weather warnings such as heatwaves and cyclones better.
The Centre of Excellence for Climate System Science's Professor Andy Pitman said predicting extreme weather in the 21st century required millions of lines of codes and complex data to be analysed in an instant.
"You cannot do that on your home computer, you need a seriously large system in order to do that kind of processing," he said.
"And fortunately we now have one of those."
Science Minister Kim Carr said Raijin would help researchers from many disciples remain at the cutting edge of global innovation.
Share
