The high-performance computing industry has fundamentally changed. While this has provided better computational resources to many individual researchers, those applications that require the highest level of computing are struggling to remain viable. The tension is heightened by U.S. policy on supercomputers. There are not enough people to provide either the scientific or information technology expertise needed to sustain all of the U.S. climate-science activities that strive to provide comprehensive capabilities. Key positions are going unfilled and students are not being trained to fill either the scientific research positions or the esoteric niches of software engineering, computational science, and computer science required for a successful high-end climate capability.
Parallel computers manufactured in the U.S., often with distributed memory, are difficult to use.
In addition, there are intrinsic limitations to the ability of climate-science algorithms to achieve high levels of performance on these computers. Japanese-manufactured computers already delivered to foreign centers assure that U.S. scientists will have significantly less computational capability for at least three to five years With the delivery of the next generation of Japanese computers, and continuation of current approaches to computing in the U.S., the gap between the U.S. and foreign centers will increase and exist for longer than five years. The purchase of Japanese vector computers would have an immediate impact on climate and weather science in the U.S. and offers the only short-term strategy for closing the computational gap between U.S. and foreign centers. There is insufficient investment in the U.S. in software. A software infrastructure must be built to support both climate and weather activities.