AI and accelerated computing will help climate researchers achieve the miracles they need to achieve breakthroughs in climate research.
This is the word from Nvidia founder and CEO Jensen Huang, speaking during a keynote at the Berlin Summit for the Earth Virtualisation Engines initiative.
“Richard Feynman once said that ‘what I can’t create, I don’t understand’ and that’s the reason why climate modeling is so important,” Huang says. “And so the work that you do is vitally important to policymakers to researchers to the industry.”
To advance this work, the Berlin Summit brings together participants from around the globe to harness AI and high performance computing for climate prediction.
Huang outlines three miracles that will have to happen for climate researchers to achieve their goals, also touching on Nvidia’s own efforts to collaborate with climate researchers and policymakers with its Earth-2 efforts.
Huang says the first miracle required will be to simulate the climate fast enough, and with a high enough resolution — on the order of just a couple of square kilometers.
The second miracle needs to be the ability to pre-compute vast quantities of data.
He believes the third is the ability to visualize all this data interactively with Nvidia Omniverse to “put it in the hands of policymakers, businesses, companies and researchers”.
The next wave of climate and weather innovation
The Earth Virtualidation Engines initiative, known as EVE, is an international collaboration that brings together digital infrastructure focused on climate science, HPC and AI aiming to provide, for the first time, easily accessible kilometer-scale climate information to sustainably manage the planet.
The initiative promises to accelerate the pace of advances, advocating coordinated climate projections at 2,5km resolution. It’s an enormous challenge, but it’s one that builds on a base of advancements over the past 25 years.
A sprawling suite of applications already benefits from accelerated computing, including ICON, IFS, NEMO, MPAS, WRF-G and more — and much more computing power for such applications is coming.
The Nvidia GH200 Grace Hopper Superchip is an accelerated CPU designed from the ground up for giant-scale AI and HPC applications. It delivers up to 10-times higher performance for applications running terabytes of data.
It’s built to scale and, by connecting large numbers of these chips together, Nvidia can offer systems with the power efficiency to accelerate the work of researchers at the cutting edge of climate research. “To the software, it looks like one giant processor,” Huang explains.
To help researchers put vast quantities of data to work, quickly, to unlock understanding, Huang speaks about Nvidia Modulus, an open-source framework for building, training and fine-tuning physics-based machine learning models, and FourCastNet, a global, data-driven weather forecasting model, and how the latest AI-driven models can learn physics from real-world data.
Using raw data alone, FourCastNet is able to learn the principles governing complex weather patterns. Huang showed how FourCastNet was able to accurately predict the path of Hurricane Harvey by modeling the Coriolis force, the effect of the Earth’s rotation, on the storm.
Such models, when tethered to regular “checkpoints” created by traditional simulation, allow for more detailed, long-range forecasts. Huang demonstrates how, running FourCastNet in Modulus, Nvidia is able to generate 21-day weather trajectories of 1 000 ensemble members in one-tenth the time it previously took to do a single ensemble – and with 1 000-times less energy consumption.
Huang says Nvidia technologies promise to help all this knowledge become more accessible with digital twins able to create interactive models of increasingly complex systems — from Amazon warehouses to the way 5G signals propagate in dense urban environments.
Earth: the final frontier
To help meet challenges such as these, Huang outlines how Nvidia is building more powerful systems for training AI models, simulating physical problems and interactive visualization.
“These new types of supercomputers are just coming online,” he says. “This is as fresh a computing technology as you can imagine.”
“Earth, the final frontier, these are the voyages of EVE,” Huang says. Its “mission is to push the limits of computing in service of climate modeling, to seek out new methods and technologies to study the global-to-local state of the climate to inform today the impact of mitigation and adaptation to Earth’s tomorrow, to boldly go where no one has gone before.”