Stanford University Tuesday is opening the doors to a new research center that is tapping technology from Sun Microsystems to better understand Earth sciences.“Our long-term goal is to build large-scale, big integrated models that do analysis, simulation, and to some degree predictions of what might happen in future,” said Jerry Harris, director of the new Stanford Center for Computational Earth and Environmental Science (CEES) and a professor of geophysics at Stanford.The center is a joint collaboration among Stanford University, government agencies and private industry. Sun contributed hardware and software including its x64 Opteron-based servers, Sparc-based Sun Fire servers and Solaris operating system. The systems are helping fuel research into such areas as climate change, earthquake science and oil exploration. “Those models on desktop computers take days; running them on the new system takes a few hours. So we can ask more what-if questions and run more scenarios. We can start to develop some statistical understanding of how things might change in the future and how human interventions might change those things,” Harris said.For example, the researchers are studying how the oceans take up carbon and how potential alterations to the oceans could affect the climate. They’re also using satellite-based radar to stream down petabytes’ worth of data to study images showing defamation to the Earth’s surface, like in the case of an earthquake or water withdrawal from the Earth’s subsurface in drought-ridden areas such as Las Vegas. Right now the researchers match applications to computing resources based on memory needs, but they plan to work with Sun and other IT providers to further refine computer systems to suit scientific applications.“Ultimately we want to integrate applications and develop bigger, multidiscipline applications, where some pieces of the application run on large memory systems and other pieces run on distributed systems and then bring together the results in a coupled way,” Harris said.-Shelley Solheim, IDG News Service (New York Bureau)Check out our CIO News Alerts and Tech Informer pages for more updated news coverage. Related content brandpost ChatGPT and Your Organisation: How to Monitor Usage and Be More Aware of Security Risks By Hayley Salyer Jun 05, 2023 7 mins Chatbots Artificial Intelligence brandpost Who’s paying your data integration tax? Reducing your data integration tax will get you one step closer to value—let’s start today. By Sandrine Ghosh Jun 05, 2023 4 mins Data Management feature 13 essential skills for accelerating digital transformation IT leaders too often find themselves behind on business-critical transformation efforts due to gaps in the technical, leadership, and business skills necessary to execute and drive change. By Stephanie Overby Jun 05, 2023 12 mins Digital Transformation IT Skills tip 3 things CIOs must do now to accurately hit net-zero targets More than a third of the world’s largest companies are making their net-zero targets public, yet nearly all will fail to hit them if they don’t double the pace of emissions reduction by 2030. This puts leading executives, CIOs in particul By Diana Bersohn and Mauricio Bermudez-Neubauer Jun 05, 2023 5 mins CIO Accenture Emerging Technology Podcasts Videos Resources Events SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER From our editors straight to your inbox Get started by entering your email address below. Please enter a valid email address Subscribe