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Earth-2: A Supercomputer for Climate Change

Nvidia, a leading company in graphics and artificial intelligence, yes the same company that upscales your 1080p gameplay to 4k with little to no quality loss using AI, has announced a bold initiative to build an AI supercomputer that can simulate the Earth's climate and weather. The project, called Earth-2 or E-2, aims to create a digital twin of our planet in Nvidia's Omniverse platform, a virtual environment for 3D collaborations and simulations.

Why do we need Earth-2? 

According to Nvidia's CEO Jensen Huang, climate change is one of the most urgent challenges of our time, and we need to act with more urgency. However, current climate models are not accurate enough to predict the regional impacts of extreme weather events, such as droughts, heatwaves, hurricanes, and floods. These events are influenced by complex interactions between the atmosphere, oceans, land, ice, and human activities. Just for an example the weather forecast we see in the news or in an app in your phone is predicted using supercomputers and even using those we can only predict barely up to ten days, and we know how accurate that ten days can be. Reason for this is the fact that even supercomputers are not powerful enough to handle all of that data, there're so much at play like temperature, air pressure, humidity, wind, ocean currents, elevation and so much more all interacting with each other and changing in every second. It's basically chaos after a certain time but it's not impossible.

To improve our understanding and prediction of climate change, we need to increase the resolution and complexity of climate models. This requires enormous amounts of computing power and data. Nvidia estimates that we need millions to billions of times more computing power than what is available today to simulate the Earth at meter-scale resolution.

How will Earth-2 work? 

Nvidia plans to use its expertise and resources in GPU-accelerated computing, deep learning, and AI supercomputers to achieve this ambitious goal. Earth-2 will combine three technologies:

  • GPU-accelerated computing: Nvidia's GPUs are designed to handle parallel and high-performance computing tasks, such as processing large amounts of data and running complex simulations.(e.g.- Ray tracing, Path tracing )
  • Deep learning and physics-informed neural networks: Nvidia's deep learning algorithms can learn from vast quantities of observed and model data, and incorporate physical principles and constraints to improve accuracy and generalization.
  • AI supercomputers: Nvidia's AI supercomputers are powerful systems that can integrate thousands of GPUs and other components to run large-scale simulations and applications.

Earth-2 will use these technologies to create a digital twin of Earth in Omniverse, where scientists and researchers can collaborate and experiment with different scenarios and interventions. Earth-2 will also use super-resolution techniques to enhance the details and realism of the simulation.

What are the benefits of Earth-2? 

Nvidia hopes that Earth-2 will provide actionable information for policymakers, businesses, and individuals to mitigate and adapt to climate change. By simulating the Earth at ultra-high resolution, Earth-2 will be able to capture the regional variations and extremes of climate change, such as changes in precipitation patterns, cloud formation, sea level rise, and biodiversity loss. This will help us understand the risks and opportunities of different regions and sectors, and plan accordingly.

Earth-2 will also enable us to see and feel our future today, by creating immersive and interactive experiences in Omniverse. This will help us raise awareness and motivation for climate action among the public and stakeholders.

This isn't their first project of this kind. Nvidia has already launched Cambridge-1, the world's most powerful AI supercomputer for healthcare research. Cambridge-1 is being used by leading healthcare companies to accelerate drug discovery, genomics, medical imaging, and more. Nvidia's Earth-2 is an ambitious and visionary project that could revolutionize our understanding and response to climate change. By harnessing the power of GPU-accelerated computing, deep learning, and AI supercomputers, Nvidia aims to create a digital twin of Earth that can simulate our past, present, and future climate with unprecedented accuracy and detail.

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