Earth Simulator

The Earth Simulator (ES) was the fastest supercomputer in the world from 2002 to 2004. The system was developed for JAXA, JAERI, and JAMSTEC in 1997 for running global climate models to evaluate the effects of global warming and problems in solid earth geophysics. It has been able to run holistic simulations of global climate in both the atmosphere and the oceans down to a resolution of 10 km. Located at the Earth Simulator Center (ESC) in Kanazawa, Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan, the computer is capable of 35.86 trillion (35,860,000,000,000) floating-point calculations per second, or 35.86 TFLOPS. Built by NEC, the ES is based on their SX-6 architecture. It consists of 640 nodes with eight vector processors and 16 gibibytes of computer memory at each node, for a total of 5120 processors and 10 tebibytes of memory. Two nodes are installed per 1 metre x 1.4 metre x 2 metre cabinet. Each cabinet consumes 20 kW of power. The system has 700 terabytes of disk storage (450 for the system and 250 for the users) and 1.6 petabytes of mass storage in tape drives. The ES is almost five times faster than ASCI White.

Earth Simulator

old Earth Simulator

Largest Supercomputers to Simulate Life on Earth, Including Economies and Whole Societies
ScienceDaily (May 28, 2010) Scientists are planning to use the largest supercomputers to simulate life on Earth, including the financial system, economies and whole societies. The project is called "Living Earth Simulator" and part of a huge EU research initiative named FuturIcT.

Supercomputers are already being used to explore complex social and economic problems that science can understand in no other way. For example, ETH Zurich's professor for transport engineering Kay Axhausen is simulating the travel activities of all 7.5 Million inhabitants of Switzerland to forecast and mitigate traffic congestion. Other researchers at the ETH -- all working within its Competence Center for Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems (CCSS) -- are mining huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as communication networks or the Internet. Coping with Crises In the past, supercomputers have been used mainly in physics or biology, or for difficult engineering problems such as the construction of new aircrafts. But now they are increasingly being used for social and economic analyses, even of the most fundamental human processes. At the CCSS, for example, Lars-Erik Cederman uses large-scale computer models to study the origin of international conflict, and is creating a large database documenting the geographic interdependencies of civil violence and wars in countries such as the former Yugoslavia or Iraq. In sociology, simulations at the CCSS have explored the conditions under which cooperation and solidarity can thrive in societies. They show that the crust of civilization is disturbingly vulnerable. These simulations reveal common patterns behind breakdowns of social order in events as

diverse as the war in former Yugoslavia, lootings after earthquakes or other natural disasters, or the recent violent demonstrations in Greece. Social Super-Computing The CCSS, particularly the Financial Crisis Observatory led by Didier Sornette, is currently the biggest shareholder of ETH Zurich's Brutus supercomputing cluster, which is currently the 88th fastest computer in the world and ranked 10th in Europe. Social supercomputing is also a new focus of other renowned research centres such as the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Brookings Institution in the United States. Such simulations, researchers now widely recognize, represent the best chance to gain insight into highly complex problems ranging from traffic flows to evacuation scenarios of entire cities or the spreading of epidemics. Independent projects in the United States and in Europe have already embarked on efforts to build simulations of the entire global economy. The FuturIcT project aims to bring many efforts of this kind together in order to simulate the entire globe, including all the diverse interactions of social systems and of the economy with our environment. The concept for the project has already been deeply explored within several European research projects. Large-Scale Data Mining Complementary to large-scale computer simulations, the FuturIcT project also aims to gather and organise data on social, economic and environmental processes on an unprecedented scale, especially by augmenting the results of field studies and laboratory experiments with the overwhelming flood of data now resulting from the world wide web or massive multi-player online worlds such as Second Life. Furthermore, the rapid emergence of vast networks of distributed sensors will make data available on an almost unimaginable scale for direct use in computer simulations. At the same time, an ethics committee and targeted research will ensure that these data will be explored in privacyrespecting ways and not misused. The goal is to identify statistical interdependencies when many people interact, but not to track or predict individual behaviour. Crises Observatories In a practical sense, the scientists behind the FuturIcT project foresee the development of crises observatories and decision-support systems for politicians and business leaders. "Such observatories would detect advance warning signs of many different kinds of emerging problems," says Dirk Helbing, "including large-scale congestion, financial instabilities, the spreading of diseases, environmental change, resource shortages and social conflicts." The FuturIcT project led by him aims to put the power of today's information technology to work in creating the tools needed to address the challenges of humanity in the future, and to ensure social and economic well-being around the globe. Economic and Policy Opportunities

George Soros, who has established the Institute of New Economic Thinking (INET) with an endowment of 50 million dollars, has welcomed the initiative and writes: "The team of scientists that Dr. Helbing has gathered together can, I believe, make a significant contribution to the understanding of the evolution and change in societies as they meet the formidable issues of governance, climate change, sustainable economic balance that we are all faced with in the coming decades." More information: http://www.futurict.eu/

Quantum Simulator and Supercomputer at the Crossroads

ScienceDaily (Oct. 4, 2010) MPQ-LMU scientists in an international collaboration measure for the first time a many-body phase diagram with ultracold atoms in optical lattices at finite temperatures.

Transitions between different phases of matter are a phenomenon occurring in everyday life. For example water -- depending on its temperature -- can take the form of a solid, a liquid or a gas. The circumstances that lead to the phase-transition of a substance are of fundamental interest in understanding emergent quantum phenomena of a many-particle system. In this respect, the ability to study phase transition between novel states of matter with ultracold atoms in optical lattices has raised the hope to answer open questions in condensed matter physics. MPQ-LMU scientists around Prof. Immanuel Bloch in collaboration with physicists in Switzerland, France, the United States and Russia have now for the first time determined the phase-diagram of an interacting many-particle system at finite temperatures. Employing state-of-the art numerical quantum "Monte Carlo" methods implemented on a supercomputer, it was possible to validate the measurements and the strategies used to extract the relevant information from them. This exemplary benchmarking provides an important milestone on the way towards quantum simulations with ultracold atoms in optical lattices beyond the reach of numerical methods and present day super computers. In the experiments, a sample of up to 300.000 "bosonic" rubidium atoms was cooled down to a temperature close to absolute zero -- approximately minus 273C. At such low temperatures, all atoms in the ultracold gas tend to behave exactly the same, forming a new state of matter known as Bose-Einstein condensate (BEC). Once this state is reached, the researchers "shake" the atoms to intentionally heat them up again, thereby

controlling the temperature of the gas to better than one hundredth of a millionth of a degree. The so-prepared ultracold -- yet not as cold -- gas is then loaded into a threedimensional optical lattice. Such a lattice is created by three mutually orthogonal standing waves of laser light, forming "a crystal of light" in which the atoms are trapped. Much like electrons in a real solid body, they can move within the lattice and interact with each other repulsively. It is this analogy that has sparked a vast interest in this field, since it allows for the study of complex condensed matter phenomena in a tunable system without defects. When being loaded into the optical lattice, the atoms can arrange in three different phases depending on their temperature, their mobility and the strength of the repulsion between them. If the strength of the repulsion between the atoms is much larger than their mobility, a so-called Mott-insulator will form at zero temperature in which the atoms are pinned to their lattice sites. If the mobility increases, a quantum phase transition is crossed towards a superfluid phase in which the wave functions of the atoms are delocalized over the whole lattice. The superfluid phase exists up to a transition temperature above which a normal gas is formed. This temperature tends to absolute zero as the phase transition between the superfluid and the Mott-insulator is approached -- a feature which is typical in the vicinity of a quantum phase transition. In order to determine the phase of the atoms in the experiments, they are instantaneously released from the optical lattice. Now, according to the laws of quantum mechanics, a matter wave expands from each of the lattice sites, much like electromagnetic waves expanding from an array of light sources. And as in the latter case, an interference pattern emerges that reflects the coherence properties of the array of sources. It is this information of the coherence properties that the scientists are looking at in order to read out the many-body phase of the atoms in the artificial crystal: The normal gas in the lattice shows little coherence and almost no interference pattern would be visible after releasing the atoms. The superfluid, however, does exhibit long-range phase coherence which results in sharp interference peaks. By determining the temperature of the onset of these defined structures for various ratios of interaction strength and mobility, the researchers could map out the complete phase boundary between the superfluid and the normal gas. Given the large number of particles and the size of the artificial crystal, it is extremely demanding to simulate the physics of the present systems on a classical computer. Only recently, suitable quantum Monte Carlo methods have been developed, that allow for the direct simulation of the experiments on up to ten billion lattice sites without significant simplification of the problem. They have been implemented at the ETH in Zurich on the "Brutus" computer cluster. With the simulation results, it was for the first time possible to directly determine the temperature of the lattice gas, to quantify heating rates in the optical lattice and to validate the strategies employed to determine the phase diagram. The numerical calculations, however, could last several days, up to weeks, where the experiments could be performed within one or two hours. This difference in the timescales shows the value of the experimental setup as a "quantum simulator" of

numerous, more complex problems beyond the reach of state-of-the-art numerical methods.
enlarge

Matter-wave interference patterns across the BEC transition in the lattice: The image shows interference patterns of ultracold atoms released from an optical lattice at temperatures ranging from 10nK to 50nK (increasing from left to right). The experimental results (front row) perfectly match numerical quantum Monte Carlo simulations (back row) performed without free parameters. As the sample becomes colder sharp interference peaks appear (center), indicating the transition from a normal gas to a so-called superfluid. (Credit: MPQ)

Supercomputer project aims to simulate the whole world

In a sort of giant Sim game, scientists are planning to use some of the world's largest supercomputers to simulate all life on Earth, including the financial system, economies and whole societies. The project is called Living Earth Simulator, and forms part of a huge EU research initiative named FuturIcT. It will unite various existing projects and expand upon them. For example, ETH Zurich is simulating the travel activities of all 7.5 million inhabitants of Switzerland to forecast and cope with traffic congestion. Other researchers are mining huge amounts of financial data to detect dangerous bubbles in stock and housing markets, potential bankruptcy cascades in networks of companies, or similar vulnerabilities in other complex networks such as the internet.

Other existing simulations reveal common patterns behind the breakdown of social order in events as diverse as the war in former Yugoslavia, lootings after earthquakes or other natural disasters, or the recent violent demonstrations in Greece. But there are even greater ambitions for the FuturIcT project, which also aims to bring in data from field studies and laboratory experiments, along with data from the internet and even games such as Second Life. An ethics committee promises to make sure individual identities are kept secret. The scientists behind the project foresee the development of crisis observatories and decision-support systems for politicians and business leaders. "Such observatories would detect advance warning signs of many different kinds of emerging problems, including large-scale congestion, financial instabilities, the spreading of diseases, environmental change, resource shortages and social conflicts," " says the project's Dirk Helbing.