The climate of Middle-Earth

[Particles the Greek]

Is simulated here. Just imagine if this could be made into a more general-purpose program which would run on your PC or tablet, and not a supercomputer!

[Zaarin]

That would be nice. I'm horrible at climate models.

[Rhetorica]

Most clusters these days run Linux on standard Intel or AMD 64-bit CPUs. You actually can run climate simulators on home computers (if they're running Linux or Unix), but they'd take years to run enough data to be significant.

The real issue is that you can't get the source code or binaries for most of them, which is downright indefensible in this day and age. (HadCM3L, used in the paper, is under strict licence for distribution to collaborators only.)

[Izambri]

Nice work. It even has translations in Elvish and Darwish!

[Jipí]

Nice work. It even has translations in Elvish and Darwish!

I didn't know that Tolkien's famous conlangs, Elvish and Dwarvish, are exactly equivalent to English written with funny letters.

I mean, it's certainly a nice publicity gag, but the nerd in me Doesn't. Find. That. Funny. For reasons!

Apply sarcasm tags where needed.

[Izambri]

Nice work. It even has translations in Elvish and Darwish!

I didn't know that Tolkien's famous conlangs, Elvish and Dwarvish, are exactly equivalent to English written with funny letters.

I mean, it's certainly a nice publicity gag, but the nerd in me Doesn't. Find. That. Funny. For reasons!

Apply sarcasm tags where needed.

Please, note the sarcasm in my message. ; )

[sangi39]

That would be nice. I'm horrible at climate models.

Same. It'd be nice to just design a planet, plug the various details into a computer and get a nice little climate model that would show you roughly how the climate would change through the year. It's a shame really, especially for people who just can't get their heads round the subject.

On a different note, did they really use a university's supercomputer for that? I wonder if I could book some time on it

[Zaarin]

I've heard that the next version of Universe Sandbox will have primitive climate calculation, but I already have rough simulations through Fractal Terrains 3--which interestingly never forms desert and basically creates a gradient of continental and alpine/arctic. :/

[Torco]

Give it twenty years: nowadays cellphones have more processing power than the original pentium chip. Curiously, the old 486 with 256mb of ram was able to browse the internet about as fast as my current i3 with 6 gigs of ram... but I *guess* a computer 30 times as powerful can be coerced into do stuff the weaker machine was unable to ?

Taking advantage of there being people here who know about computers... why does windows 7 always hog 1,3 gigs of ram on startup on my 6gigs of ram laptop, even though it can run on a computer with 1gig of ram hogging only 30% of it ?

[Aili Meilani]

but I *guess* a computer 30 times as powerful can be coerced into do stuff the weaker machine was unable to ?

Number crunching, like climate simulators, or databases will be much faster, but average Joe's programs will not. The reason is the latter class of programs became much slower[1], so in the end computer speed / program speed ratio is about the same (to all nitpickers: I don't have any precise measurements).

[1] you see, many programmers nowadays think that "optimization is the root of all evil". Taking it out of context by omitting the word "premature" makes it so much closer to what most programmers blindly believe. It's kinda funny, because even the "full" quote "premature optimization is the root of all evil" is itself out of context.

Taking advantage of there being people here who know about computers... why does windows 7 always hog 1,3 gigs of ram on startup on my 6gigs of ram laptop, even though it can run on a computer with 1gig of ram hogging only 30% of it ?

Caches, caches and lots of caches.

[WeepingElf]

Number crunching, like climate simulators, or databases will be much faster, but average Joe's programs will not.

Yes, because such things as word processors, spreadsheets and web browsers just wait for input most of the time.

[Aili Meilani]

And when they aren't, before they start doing useful work they display pretty graphics and give you an option to post a message to facetwit about what you're editing or viewing or something.

It's a hyperbole, but most software truly is shit these days.

[Torco]

They don't make them like they used to?

I mean that sounds like anyone could just recompile the old browsers, make java and flash run on them, and have superfast awesomesauce internet.

[Drydic]

They don't make them like they used to?

I mean that sounds like anyone could just recompile the old browsers, make java and flash run on them, and have superfast awesomesauce internet.

And immediately get saturated with things flying through their security holes.
Other than that, actually yes.