SC20 Keynote: From Deep Thoughts to (Destination) Earth: Climate Science in the Age of Exascale
Speaker
Event Type
Keynote
TP
W
TUT
XO
TimeMonday, 16 November 202010am - 11:30am EDT
LocationTrack 1
DescriptionSC20 is pleased to announce that our Keynote speaker is Professor Bjorn Stevens of the Max-Planck-Institute for Meteorology. Professor Stevens will discuss how exascale computing is impacting two opportunities that are changing the face of climate science. One arises from what exascale will enable; the other from what it will not.
“Much like the Large Hadron Collider broke an energy barrier to bring us the Higgs boson, exaFLOPS will break a scale barrier, bringing about a fundamentally new way of computing the climate system,” commented Stevens. “Computing with exaFLOPS has such profound implications for climate modeling and Earth information systems. Beyond exascale, the game changes completely.”
According to Stevens, this change is rooted in the absence of further attainable critical scales, which shifts the focus from deep computation to deep interaction. This shift in focus has the potential to unravel mysteries that have remained unexplained up until now.
Professor Stevens’ main field of interest is in the way atmospheric water; particularly in the form of clouds; shapes climate. His contributions to understanding how turbulent mixing and cloud-microphysical processes influence cloud amount have been instrumental in helping to understand how clouds respond to warming, and how radiative forcing responds to aerosol perturbations, both of which are fundamental to the present comprehension of climate change.
His measurements have identified new forms of clouds that arise in response to precipitation, provided the first quantification of cloud top mixing and illustrated and quantified the vertical structure of large-scale vertical motion fields in the tropics and sub-tropics.
“Much like the Large Hadron Collider broke an energy barrier to bring us the Higgs boson, exaFLOPS will break a scale barrier, bringing about a fundamentally new way of computing the climate system,” commented Stevens. “Computing with exaFLOPS has such profound implications for climate modeling and Earth information systems. Beyond exascale, the game changes completely.”
According to Stevens, this change is rooted in the absence of further attainable critical scales, which shifts the focus from deep computation to deep interaction. This shift in focus has the potential to unravel mysteries that have remained unexplained up until now.
Professor Stevens’ main field of interest is in the way atmospheric water; particularly in the form of clouds; shapes climate. His contributions to understanding how turbulent mixing and cloud-microphysical processes influence cloud amount have been instrumental in helping to understand how clouds respond to warming, and how radiative forcing responds to aerosol perturbations, both of which are fundamental to the present comprehension of climate change.
His measurements have identified new forms of clouds that arise in response to precipitation, provided the first quantification of cloud top mixing and illustrated and quantified the vertical structure of large-scale vertical motion fields in the tropics and sub-tropics.