SX-5 in TorontoToronto 16 June 2000 The Department of Physics, University of Toronto, has installed an SX-5/4C parallel vector supercomputer that provides 32 Gflop/s of peak performance and is configured with 32 GByte of main memory. The department's atmospheric physics group is operating the system primarily to support climate research using a coupled atmosphere-ocean-ice-land surface modeling system.
The supercomputer will also be used in broad areas of earth
sciences research related to the planetary interior and its fluid envelopes.
In the latter area, research programs are in progress investigating the
structure of three-dimensional stratified-rotating turbulence in both
spherical and Cartesian geometries.
The system will also be used for the analysis of the large volumes of data
that will be delivered to the University of Toronto's atmospheric physics
laboratory from the MOPITT instrumentation, developed at the university and
aboard the NASA Earth Observing System Satellite, which monitors the
tropospheric methane and carbon monoxide concentrations and flows in the
atmosphere.
In the field of planetary interiors the group is executing locally developed
three- dimensional models of the thermal convection process of the earth's
mantle, which is responsible for the phenomenon of "plate tectonics". These
advanced models account for the influence of pressure-induced phase
transitions that bracket the mantle transition zone resulting from plate
circulation. Future developments will include the implementation of models
incorporating the effects of the planetary magnetic field on the flow in
Earth's core, and of the flow in the core on the field generation (dynamo)
process itself.
Also of local design are models of the ice ages to which earth has been
subjected for the past several million years of it's evolutionary history, and
of the detailed variations of sea level that have occurred over the same
interval of time.
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