NSF Gives Supercomputer Time For 3-D Model of Spill 102
Posted
by
timothy
from the why-can't-we-just-add-a-vinegar-spill? dept.
from the why-can't-we-just-add-a-vinegar-spill? dept.
CWmike writes "Scientists have embarked on a crash effort to use one the world's largest supercomputers to create 3-D models to simulate how BP's massive Gulf of Mexico oil spill will affect coastal areas. Acting within 24 hours of receiving a request from researchers, the National Science Foundation late last week made an emergency allocation of 1 million compute hours on a supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center to study how BP's gusher will affect coastlines. The computer model they are working on 'has the potential to advise and undergird many emergency management decisions that may be made along the way, particularly if a hurricane comes through the area,' said Rick Luettich, a professor of marine sciences and head of the Institute of Marine Sciences at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, who is one of the researchers on this project. Meanwhile, geographic information systems vendor ESRI has added a social spin to GIS mapping of the BP oil spill."
Offtopic (Score:5, Insightful)
Explain something to me: you people bitch about government getting involved with private industry, yet when BP screws up, you demand the government to take over. WTF?
You want the government to take over...ok, what do you expect them to do? BP has the equipment, the government does not.
You all want the government to step in...yet you don't want them to raise the liability cap. So...you want taxpayers to pay for cleaning up a private company's mess, then?
Shifting gears...
This is NOT a reason to stop offshore drilling. Offshore drilling is an essential part of our current energy use. What this is, however, is a good reason to reinforce laws surrounding safety and preparedness standards...and make sure they are fucking followed.
Re:Um... (Score:5, Insightful)
Rest assured...someone knows. It just isn't us. BP likely knows, which is (from their perspective) a good reason why we don't.
Re:Offtopic (Score:5, Insightful)
Proof that a moderate such as myself will never be labeled as such.
I'm for offshore drilling because it provides us with the energy source that we currently need today. I'm also in favor of extensively researching and quickly implementing alternative fuels so that we can get away from oil entirely.
With me, it isn't "drill, baby, drill"...it's "drill for now, but not for long". Thanks for your partisan slant though, I appreciate it.
Re:Offtopic (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Offtopic (Score:5, Insightful)
Proof that a moderate such as myself will never be labeled as such.
I'm for offshore drilling because it provides us with the energy source that we currently need today. I'm also in favor of extensively researching and quickly implementing alternative fuels so that we can get away from oil entirely.
With me, it isn't "drill, baby, drill"...it's "drill for now, but not for long". Thanks for your partisan slant though, I appreciate it.
You often see this in discussions. I think the propaganda, demagoguery, invective, and intellectual dishonesty so frequently seen in the media and especially in politics has infected the easily impressionable who derive their mannerisms and actions from the media. You can call them sheeple, mindless automatons who think their behaviors and thoughts are their own original creations, easily impressionable, non-self-aware, unable to carry out introspection, followers, and lots of other things. As for that post to which you replied, what happened there has happened to me several times.
The (lack of) thinking goes something like this: "well, he used certain words or otherwise vaguely sounds a little bit like a cookie-cutter opinion that I have seen before, probably from some pundit, therefore I will refuse to deal with him as an individual and will instead regard him as a member of a school of thought or other group identity, that way I don't have to bother really listening to what he has to say or understanding where he is coming from." You'll notice this is always done to condemn and belittle, for that's how such people obtain their worthless sense of worth. Specifically, it's an attempt to diminish in order to make it easier to condemn. It treats people as members of a system and it's the very opposite of treating others like human beings.
The motivation is that they are not interested in truth. They are interested in feeling "right" or better than someone else at all costs. For them, argumentation is not about testing ideas and increasing understanding. It's about humiliating your opponent and rubbing his nose in it. Thus, they have no interest in dealing with individual human beings for, unlike mindless talking points, there are no automatic ready answers for the points they make. That interferes with their goal of feeling "right" and at the very least makes them work much harder to achieve it.
In closing, a quote from Aristotle:
Hubris: "to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater."
Re:Offtopic (Score:1, Insightful)
Do you happen to have a non-propaganda news source? America's answer to Pravda is hardly what most people would consider credible.
Re:Offtopic (Score:3, Insightful)
You want the government to take over...ok, what do you expect them to do? BP has the equipment, the government does not.
First off, whoever modded you offtopic should have his moderator priveledges taken away.
Now to the actual topic: Government shouldn't take over, but they'd damned well better show some oversight, and make sure that BP is following all laws to the letter. They may have the equipment, but they don't have the motivation -- their only motivation is to rake in profits, or the "accident" wouldn't have happened.
Obama needs to fire the head of the agency overseeing this; the regulators are, according to newspaper accounts, in bed with those they are regulating.
Personally (and I think a lot will agree) someone high up in BP ranks should spend some hard prison time over this. Of course, the people who own the mine that exploded a month or so ago should be in prison for manslaughter or negligent homicide, since they were sited time and again for the very things that caused the explosion.
Why aren't corporate heads ever put in prison for negligent homicide when the company disobeys laws and people die?
Re:Offtopic (Score:2, Insightful)
Oh, I have no doubt that the WH has "boots on the ground," as you say. I also have no doubt that the WH also has "boots under the beds" of execs from just about every sector including energy, media, finance, and automotive.
Re:In Time? (Score:3, Insightful)
Uh, no. Nobody uses the Unreal Engine or the Source Engine to model diffusion and fluid flow. This is a field I work in professionally and academically, and you'd be a laughing stock if you seriously suggested taking this route. There is an enormous difference between a game engine which is designed to make things look good, and an accurate physical simulator.
Furthermore, the underlying software already exists, academically and commercially, with 6 figure licensing fees, which is good because developing a simulator and validating it would take months, as the GP said. The challenge isn't writing the code, it's building an accurate model.