The Wall Street Journal: Digits; Big Blue to the Rescue
February 12, 2004
http://online.wsj.com/article/0,,SB107654454431127619-search,00.html?collection=autowire%2F30day&vql_string=IBM%3Cin%3E%28article%2Dbody%29

University of California at Irvine researchers have enlisted an important
new ally in their quest to predict impacts of global climate change: an IBM
supercomputer.

The university's Department of Earth System Science -- one of only a
handful of U.S. academic programs dedicated to mapping global climate
change -- had been relying on a four-year-old workstation from Silicon
Graphics Inc. But researchers at the school say the computer, which
featured 16 gigabytes of memory, was powerful enough for them to perform
computer simulations on projected changes to the atmosphere due to global
warming only five to 10 years into the future.

But they say with the IBM supercomputer -- dubbed the Earth System Modeling
Facility and featuring about 200 gigabytes of memory -- they now will be
able to chart forecasted changes to not only the air, but land and water
too, for 100 years into the future. While national computing centers have
been available to run intensive simulations, the University of California
lab lacked the time and staffing resources to use them much.

The supercomputer didn't come cheap. Sold by International Business
Machines Corp. for $1 million, the National Science Foundation paid
$700,000; the school paid the rest.