National Center for Computational Sciences

From the birth of HPC, climate research has had a voracious appetite for computing resources. John Drake, chief computational scientist for the Climate End Station at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, explains what petascale computing will do to help feed this hunger and how the lab’s work supports the mission of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

HPCwire: First, what is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and what is its main goal?

John Drake: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, was established in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme to scientifically assess the global risk of climate change, its potential impact, and options for mitigation. Since that time the IPCC has published four climate change assessments, and a fifth assessment is scheduled for publication in 2013.

HPCwire: What does Oak Ridge National Laboratory have to do with the IPCC and climate research?

Drake: As the Department of Energy’s largest science and energy laboratory and a significant contributor to the fourth IPCC assessment, ORNL has been selected by the DOE and the National Science Foundation’s National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) as a Climate End Station (CES) to help with the fifth IPCC assessment. Warren Washington of NCAR is chief scientist for the CES and I’m chief computational scientist.

Continue reading the rest of John Drake’s interview at HPCWire.