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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: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday July 20 2015, @07:39PM
A faster computer with shitty models = shitty results faster.
Even if the models are awesome, for the sake of argument, to be really good at predicting stuff they'd need lots more inputs[like millions of cell phone sensor reports] for the model to get half way decent accuracy. Then the high crunching power could be out to work.
Weather prediction is hard man.
(Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday July 20 2015, @08:02PM
Considering the mountains in the area, the fact that the prediction at 3 days is more often accurate than not is pretty darn good. The 5-day one is a fairly reliable indicator too.
But my forecast is biased by the big puddle to the left. When I was in the plains, they usually had the right patterns, but often had to adjust ETAs by 12 hours...
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Monday July 20 2015, @08:37PM
If you want an accurate weatherman, move.
Phoenix has a pretty accurate weather forecast.
(Score: 3, Funny) by bob_super on Monday July 20 2015, @09:09PM
Is it expressed in "minutes to fry an egg on your hood while you steam buns in your trunk"?
(Score: 2) by edIII on Monday July 20 2015, @10:59PM
Lemme guess...... hot, racist, and angry for the next week? Or how many minutes till fatal exposure in a shopping mall parking lot?
Technically, lunchtime is at any moment. It's just a wave function.
(Score: 2) by mmcmonster on Monday July 20 2015, @11:10PM
Is it still called weather when it's constant day-to-day all year long?
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday July 20 2015, @11:36PM
My favorite weather CSB. I live in San Diego. Last Saturday at about 6:10 AM the news showed their Accurate FutureCast!!! predictions showing it would start raining at 9:30. 5 minutes later I got coffee, looked out the window, and it was pouring.
So Accurate FutureCast!!! can't get it right 5 minutes in the future.
Ok, in all honesty the weather was pretty messed up last weekend and hard to predict. But 5 minutes vs 3 hours is pretty bad.
I came. I saw. I forgot why I came.
(Score: 1) by Kharnynb on Tuesday July 21 2015, @05:33AM
I live in the finnish lake district, they can't predict when or where it will rain with enough accuracy to set a calender by, let alone a watch.
Then again, i've seen it rain across the street while our side was sunny and dry...large bodies of water really do make predicting the weather hard.
Build a man a fire, and he'll be warm for a day. Set a man on fire, and he'll be warm for the rest of his life.
(Score: 2) by Subsentient on Tuesday July 21 2015, @01:52AM
I live outside of Phoenix, and yeah, weather prediction is very accurate here.
120F for the next 200 days? Check.
"It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society." -Jiddu Krishnamurti
(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).
(Score: 3, Informative) by VortexCortex on Monday July 20 2015, @09:53PM
If you think it's bad now, just wait for 2016. Our Weather satellites (esp. polar orbiting sats) didn't get funding soon enough and we'll have even shittier data to feed the models, esp. after the west coast GOES13 sat failed. [space.com] The rest of the world made the US the butt of a joke since we can spend trillions on wars to ensure oil is priced in $US -- spending more than NASA's entire budget just on air conditioning troops -- but we didn't spend a few million to ensure NOAA has working weather satellites. [gao.gov] Weather sats scheduled to replace the ones which were nearing end of life went unfunded which creates a "weather satellite gap". [weather.com]
Protip: Before you start a software inquisition always (read: ALWAYS) check that your input isn't garbage first.