16 - Moore’s Law

Summary

Climate modeling requires supercomputers, which are simply the most powerful computers at a given time. The history of supercomputing is briefly described. As computer chips became faster each year for the same price (Moore’s Law), supercomputers also became faster. But due to technological limitations, chips are no longer becoming faster each year. More chips are therefore needed for faster supercomputers, which means that supercomputers cost more money and consume more power every year. The newest chips, known as Graphical Processing Units (GPUs), are not as efficient at running climate models, because they are optimized for other applications like machine learning (ML). Extrapolating current trends in computing, we can expect future supercomputers that run the high-resolution climate models of the future to be very expensive and power hungry.