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Currently, the world's most powerful supercomputers can ramp up to more than a thousand trillion operations per second, or a petaflop. But computing power is not growing as fast as it has in the past. On Monday, the June 2015 listing of the Top 500 most powerful supercomputers in the world revealed the beginnings of a plateau in performance growth.
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The development rate began tapering off around 2008. Between 2010 and 2013, aggregate increases ranged between 26 percent and 66 percent. And on this June's list, there was a mere 17 percent increase from last November.
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Despite the slowdown, many computational scientists expect performance to reach exascale, or more than a billion billion operations per second, by 2020.
Hmm, if they reach exascale computing will the weatherman finally be able to predict if it's going to rain this afternoon? Because he sucks at that now.
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @08:38PM
Weather predictions are quite accurate out to a day or two. This old canard needs to DIAF.
If you compare outcomes to predictions over tie then you'll find that a "90% chance of rain" really does mean 9 times out of 10 it rained. But humans don't notice the 9 times it was correct - only the 1 time it was wrong.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Beryllium Sphere (r) on Monday July 20 2015, @09:04PM
Data are limited and uncertain, and the system goes through periods when small changes have big results.
One cool thing meteorologists do is run the same model repeatedly with inputs slightly off from the reported ones. If the output is pretty much the same, they know that they're in an interval where butterfly wings damp out to nothing, and extended forecasts become potentially reliable.
That said, weather forecasts are remarkable today. Jokes about them are leftovers from the middle of the last century.
(Score: 2) by fritsd on Monday July 20 2015, @09:26PM
Everybody seems to remember chaos theory for Jeff Goldblum's crazy role in "Jurassic Park", but almost nobody seems to remember what it actually means :-(
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Tork on Monday July 20 2015, @10:53PM
🏳️🌈 Proud Ally 🏳️🌈
(Score: 2) by TheRaven on Tuesday July 21 2015, @08:21AM
sudo mod me up
(Score: 2) by kurenai.tsubasa on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:50PM
Go to NOAA [noaa.gov] and read the forecast discussion link (example [weather.gov]). Sure, it's not an actual confidence interval like you're probably looking for, but they will throw out hints here and there about how they're interpreting the models and how confident they feel about the published forecast. Be prepared to click on all kinds of obscure abbreviations and acronyms until you get used to the jargon (when they're kind enough to turn the shorthand jargon into a link anyway).