Here’s an interesting idea from the NewScientist
While researchers are striving to make the models more realistic, they are limited by the processing power of the supercomputers that run climate models, Palmer says. “That determines how fine of a grid we can solve the equations on, because of the computing cost,” he says.
Adding a degree of randomness to a particular model and running it multiple times could provide a cheaper way to increase realism, Palmer and colleagues argue, as it could be a “poor man’s surrogate for high-resolution models”.
But, random number generation without special hardware can be expensive, and often not very random. The solution? Well, use special hardware…but not the way you may be thinking
A way around this could be to use cheap hardware – low-cost computer chips that generate output with some random noise due to the way electrons bounce through them. Essentially, those chips produce the necessary randomness for free.
“It’s very speculative,” Palmer says. “But if it can be made to work, it would make much more efficient use of power.” The idea of adding randomness into the models is “very interesting and might be helpful for some cases”, says Reto Knutti of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich, “but in my view it will not solve all problems.”
I tell you though, I’m not sure about this. Randomness in one, controlled, area of the simulation I guess could be a good thing. But if you have generally noisy chips, how do you trust any part of the calculation? How do you know your noise isn’t somewhere you don’t want it, for example? I guess I’m not alone; responses from the Twitterverse following HPCwire’s post of the original story aren’t postive
ianfoster: Sounds like nonsense to me — RT @HPCwire HPC News: Cheap and Noisy Chips Could Improve Climate Predictions
rplzzz:…I’m skeptical.If you use bit errors for “randomness”,how do you ensure that the errors are in the low bits instead of the exponent?