With all the recent talk of China’s ascension into a supercomputing superpower, let’s not forget the other up-and-comers in the HPC world. Brazil, for instance.
A recent story in Nature, describes a supercomputer to be installed at Brazil’s Centre for Weather Forecast and Climate Studies in Cachoeira Paulista, northeast of São Paulo. The machine, called Tupã, will be used for climate modeling. In particular, the system will focus on simulating the effects of carbon soot and other aerosols from Amazonian wildfires. The Brazilians will team up climate modeling researchers at the Hadley Centre in Exeter, UK to help propel the effort forward. From the Nature article:
Brazilian science minister Sergio Rezende proposed the initiative three years ago, as a strategic investment intended to nurture a relatively small climate-modelling team and help bolster Brazilian climate science on the international stage. Tupã builds on several decades of effort to develop a weather- and climate-modelling capacity; in time, the supercomputer could help to earn Brazil a place in the small club of nations that contributes global climate-modelling expertise to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). China has paved the way among developing countries, but Brazil would be the first country in the Southern Hemisphere, apart from Australia, to develop such a capacity.
Tupã is an XT6 Cray machine that clocks in at more than 244 teraflops. And while that falls short of the petaflop club, it will likely be the most powerful super in the Southern Hemisphere when it becomes fully operational in February 2011. The system is actually scheduled for boot-up later this month, but will only be running at 20 percent capacity until they can tap into the power need to run the machine at full tilt.
Beside the collaboration with the Brits mentioned above, the Brazilian have also teamed up with climate researchers in South Africa and India and plan to host a new Earth system modeling workshop for scientists from all three countries next summer.