"An advance guard of 18-wheelers is scheduled to roll into a business park in Cheyenne, Wyo., this week to unload components of a supercomputer called Yellowstone. This 1.5-quadrillion-calculations-per-second crystal ball will model future climate and forecast extreme weather."
"'It’s a big deal,' said climate scientist Linda Mearns of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. Yellowstone will help researchers calculate climate change on a regional, rather than continental, scale. With a better grasp of how warming may affect local water resources, endangered species and extreme winds, local and state governments will be able to plan more effectively.
Marika Holland, chief scientist for NCAR’s Community Earth System Modeling Project, said the new supercomputer is 'close to a game-changer. We’ve had incremental improvements in our computational resources over time, but . . . Yellowstone is a whole new scale, and there are things that we will be able to explore that just were not possible before.'"
Stephen P. Nash reports for the Washington Post May 28, 2012.
