Darwinian Evolution at RPN
Michel Valin · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2005
The laws of evolution are cruel: adapt or die, eat or be eaten. Computers also model bilogical evolution. As new computer architectures appear and older ones wither and fade into oblivion, numerical models of the atmosphere must reflect these changes if they are to remain useful. In the early 1970’s, supercomputers used to be fast scalar machines that would handle everything from models to pre/post processing. The next breed was the vector machine, more adapted to mass processing of similar pieces of information, but less general in usability. The dominant variety of the late 1990’s and early 21st Century seems to be the Massively Parallel System, extremely powerful but even more difficult to control. We will have a look at the parallel evolution of the numerical modelling systemed used to simulation weather and climate.