Krishna Palem of Rice Unviersity and Tim Palmer of Oxford University, were quoted about their strategy to improve the efficiency of energy used to solve big problems like climate science in the New York Times article A Climate-Modeling Strategy That Won’t Hurt the Climate by John Markoff.
Excerpt from the article:
Dr. Palem believes his inexact approach is more appropriate for weather and climate modeling because the vast grids of cells that separately calculate local effects like cloud formations, wind, pressure and other variables can be calculated without great accuracy.
“I see it as a necessary tool we need now to move the science forward,” said Tim Palmer, a University of Oxford climate physicist. “We can’t do a lab experiment with the climate. We have to rely on these models which try to encode the complexity of the climate, and today we are constrained by the size of computers.”
Read the full May 2015 article on the New York Times website: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/12/science/inexact-computing-global-warming-supercomputers.html