14 DAY TRIAL // Clouds are some of the most common features in nature. Almost every time you look at the sky, you see one of many types of clouds that form at various heights and have different behaviors. These atmospheric structures can be a sign of rain, or of incoming clear weather, and they can also be found on other planets, which sustain at least a minimal atmosphere. Despite being so common, the processes that lead to their formation are not yet accurately known. Also, the interactions that make them condense out of thin air have also escaped thorough scrutiny.
Now, a group of researchers has received the green light to use one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world in order to model the complex molecular processes underlying cloud formation. The team, based at the US Department of Energy's (DOE) Ames Laboratory, has been awarded 8 million processor hours on the IBM Blue Gene supercomputer. The machine is located at the DOE Argonne National Laboratory (ANL), in Illinois.
“We know that clouds are formed by aerosol particles. The composition of the aerosols determines if a cloud is made up of a lot of small particles or large particles, which in turn impacts the size of clouds, their longevity and the probability they will produce rain,” says Ames Laboratory associate scientist and Iowa State University chemistry professor Theresa Windus. She is also the principal investigator on the new research. The director of the Ames Laboratory Applied Mathematics and Computational Sciences program, Mark Gordon, will also be involved in the investigation.
The computer hours were allotted under the coveted Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) award. The DOE makes more than 1.6 billion computer hours available through this program for 2010, to about 69 teams, including the Ames one. Such opportunities allow “scientists and engineers to conduct cutting-edge research in just weeks or months rather than the years or decades needed previously. This facilitates scientific breakthroughs in areas such as climate change, alternative energy, life sciences, and materials science,” the DOE says of INCITE.
“The Department of Energy has some of the most powerful computers in the world, and the INCITE program provides time on some of them for researchers to perform complex calculations. Competition for INCITE awards is tough, and they go to the best and brightest to address the toughest problems that can be solved today. We are very pleased to be part of this important collaboration between national labs,” says Ames Laboratory director Alex King.