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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
ENOUGH TALK: TECHNOLOGY DOES
SOMETHING ABOUT THE WEATHER
By Alan Ganek, Vice President Of Autonomic
Computing, IBM
A butterfly flaps its wings in India, and sometime later a snowstorm
immobilizes Chicago. We've all heard some variation of that description of
complexity: How one event can contribute to a seemingly unrelated event
through a series of exquisitely intricate interactions. It's particularly apt
as applied to the weather, a system of such complexity that it seems to laugh
at our attempts to predict its behavior.
We might finally be getting the last laugh, however. A group of
universities,
led by the University of Massachusetts, is developing a revolutionary new
weather-forecasting system. Using innovative radar installations coupled with
an exciting new technology called Grid computing, it will be able to give more
precise and timely alerts of life-threatening meteorological events than ever
before.
A better weather-forecasting and warning system will be no small
achievement.
In the United States alone, weather damage costs us more than $11 billion each
year, to say nothing of the lives lost. According to the National Weather
Service (NWS), some 10 percent of the nation's gross domestic product derives
from weather-sensitive industries. And things are not likely to improve:
Population shifts to coastal areas leave us ever more vulnerable to tropical
storm and hurricane damage. Further, some predict that global warming may
actually result in more severe winters in some parts of the world.
The new system, headquartered at UMass and known as the Collaborative
Adaptive
Sensing of the Atmosphere (CASA), will rely on a multitude of low-power radars
mounted on cellular-communications towers. These towers will feed data into a
computer network powerful enough to read patterns that are too complex for
today's systems.
Currently, the NWS relies on five satellites and 141 Doppler radar stations
to
track the weather and provide continuous wind, humidity, and precipitation
data for predictions. There are two major problems with this system. First,
because of the nature of radar, which only "sees" in a straight line, most of
the measurements are taken thousands of feet above the earth's surface. This
is often of little help in identifying what's happening at ground level, where
the weather does its damage. For example, the tornadoes that nobody knows
about until it's too late often sneak in under the radar.
With CASA, a network of hundreds of localized radar systems will be able to
track events close to the ground, greatly increasing the opportunities to
catch disturbances with enough lead time to warn people that something's
brewing.
Second, it's one thing to collect data; it's another to turn it into useful
information. To put it bluntly, until now computers were a weak match for the
weather, whose complexities taxed the most sophisticated, most powerful
data-processing systems.
Grid computing changes all that by enabling us to link great numbers of
computers together through a Web network and use their resources on demand.
Computers spend a great deal of time sitting idle while their processors wait
for data. On the Grid, the idle time of hundreds -- even thousands -- of
computers can be harnessed by CASA when it needs a massive infusion of
processing power, both to direct the radar and to analyze incoming data.
This technology is not limited to the weather. Pharmaceutical companies and
medical-research organizations are harnessing it to develop new drugs,
crunching data in days and weeks that used to take months and years. A virtual
observatory on the Web comprising thousands of computers analyzes millions of
pages of data to discover new celestial objects. Oil exploration, earthquake
prediction, genetic research -- even the search for alien life in the universe
-- all are using Grids to get the computer power necessary to find the big
answers to the big questions.
We live in a complex universe. Throughout human history we've attempted to
illuminate those complexities -- to explain them, predict where they will lead
us, and search for ways to use them. Will we ever know which butterfly caused
which storm? Or what's out there waiting for us among the stars? All we can
say for sure is that, with innovative technology like Grid computing, we're a
few steps closer to the answers.
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