Q. How do the supercomputers used by weather centers gather so much power?

Submitted by Hanna Barton, sixth grade, Jefferson Middle School

A. Today's supercomputers are built around parallel processors, and they gather their power from many chips working alongside each other, said Robert Aune, a meteorologist at UW-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies.

Aune, who works for the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, said the main forecast computer at the National Weather Service has about 2,000 processors. The machine relies on software that breaks the gigantic problem of weather forecasting down into steps that it farms out to the different processors so it can turn out a national forecast in an hour.

Weather forecasting was one of the first problems tackled by computers back in the 1950s, Aune said, and the basic reason is that the atmosphere is indescribably complex.

"Weather prediction had been a topic of interest for centuries — weather affects everybody — and all of a sudden they had the calculating ability to address it," he said.

Accurate weather forecasting is a data-hungry business, but cramming all that data into a computer — and churning out a forecast fast enough to be helpful — boosts the computing requirements.

But computers are getting faster and cheaper, and parallel processing is now appearing on desktop machines, Aune said. His new, $5,000 desktop machine sports eight processors, making it much faster than the supercomputer he used about 15 years ago. That world-beater cost $20 million.

--- Produced in cooperation with University Communications

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