GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
1–10 of 33 posts
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#2Run this for mountains, ski resorts so we know exactly which areas/runs will be most windy.
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#3Well this is the coolest thing I've seen in weather tech in a while. I wonder if they will pair this with additional city-level data collection - anemometers/mini weather stations on the sides of buildings, etc. I'm the barometer-data-from-phones guy running All Clear on Play Store US: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...
with an interest in hyperlocal weather forecasting.
I didn't see much about forecast accuracy in this article, but, still, extremely cool. I do wonder how much accuracy is possible - you cannot necessarily know how trucks and other human-caused short-term atmosphere changes will affect the weather.
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#4This seems a bit much to enable good pizza delivery. The funders seem more interested in urban airflows for bioweapons attacks or other slightly more critical problems.
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#5This might enable simulation but forecasting is a chaotic problem isn't it? It's essentially like trying to predict a stream of random numbers - even if they follow a certain attractor, it's still impossible to know exactly what form they'll take.
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#6This might enable simulation but forecasting is a chaotic problem isn't it? It's essentially like trying to predict a stream of random numbers - even if they follow a certain attractor, it's still impossible to know exactly what form they'll take.
Forecasting is done, and it's done by creating ensembles of weather simulations.
Weather is chaotic, which is why forecast accuracy rapidly drops off the further out in time you make predictions. But still, they can be accurate enough far enough out into the future to be extremely useful.
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#7This might enable simulation but forecasting is a chaotic problem isn't it? It's essentially like trying to predict a stream of random numbers - even if they follow a certain attractor, it's still impossible to know exactly what form they'll take.
Partial differential equations over multiple dimensions is innately chaotic, with exponential error bounds (the longer any simulation goes, the exponentially bigger the errors get).
But getting more-and-more accurate predictions is the goal of any weather modeler. If the exponential error bounds gives you currently 1-day worth of predictions before the models go to crap... maybe an improved algorithm (or 10x more compute power) can get you 2-days worth of predictions instead.
Even if you don't get a major change (maybe going from 1 day worth of predictions to 1.1 days of predictions), you might be able to convert that into 1/10th the compute power needed (ex: lower the accuracy down to 1-day prediction but cut back dramatically on the compute-power needed to perform the simulation).
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#8“CPUs excel at performing multiple tasks, including control, logic, and device-management operations, but their ability to perform fast arithmetic calculations is limited. GPUs are the opposite. Originally designed to render 3D video games, GPUs are capable of fewer tasks than CPUs, but they are specially designed to perform mathematical calculations very rapidly.”
I thought the advantage of the GPU is not speed but parallelism or are modern power saving processors also slow compared to GPUs on non-parallel tasks?
Also, is it common to use Registered Trademarks (FastEddy) in a paper these days. I know a lot of universities try to commercialize research, is this the reason for the trademark?
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#9For some context, WRF (https://github.com/wrf-model/WRF), the current state-of-the-art weather modeling system (also developed by NCAR) can (to my limited knowledge) only run on CPU. There have been efforts to run it on GPU (https://wrfg.net)... though it doesn't look like it's been kept up to date.
It seems like FastEddy mostly replaces WRF-LES, which is used for high-resolution localized modeling.
Re: GPUs open the potential to forecast urban weather for drones and air taxis
#10“CPUs excel at performing multiple tasks, including control, logic, and device-management operations, but their ability to perform fast arithmetic calculations is limited. GPUs are the opposite. Originally designed to render 3D video games, GPUs are capable of fewer tasks than CPUs, but they are specially designed to perform mathematical calculations very rapidly.” I thought the advantage of the GPU is not speed but…
> I thought the advantage of the GPU is not speed but parallelism or are modern power saving processors also slow compared to GPUs on non-parallel tasks?
Fast and parallel are two ways to say the same thing, or in other words, the wide parallelism of the GPU's many math cores is what makes it faster than CPU's relatively small capability to do math in parallel. (The x-factor is so large, the power saving features don't really make a meaningful difference.) The tradeoff is you need a highly parallel workload to be efficient and that much faster on the GPU.