China's answer to AIRPOCALYPSE: Fire up the supercomputer

China has decided to use the power of supercomputing to help in its on-going quest to beat the smog that is turning the country into an international coughing laughing stock. The Tianhe-1A, which took number one spot on the oft-changing Top 500 list for a few months in 2010, will be set to work trying to figure out the cause …

[Kevin McMurtrie]

The building is driven by 10 megawatts of solar power, of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

Entirely predictable

I'm sure many readers will remember seeing footage of roads in Beijing in the 70s and 80s: Stacked with people on identical black bikes. I'm also sure I'm not the only one that thought that if the day ever came when they swapped their bikes for cars then this kind of pollution was inevitable.

[Chairo]

They have to do something

so they decided to study the problem a bit longer.

Or with other words: let's win some time until winter is over or the weather changes. (Whatever comes first).

And no, it has nothing to do with the long, long delays in introduction of stronger emission standards. (cough, cough)

[Alan Brown]

Re: They have to do something

Enhanced automobile emission standards won't help much - most of the smog is due to coalburning in private dwellings or apartment blocks.

[Andy Gates]

Re: They have to do something

We tackled that with the Clean Air act and its friends. Low-emmissions fuel and a big push to electrify (and gasify) domestic heating.

Should be relatively easy for a more centrally-controlled setup to reproduce. Wrap it in a 5 Year Smog Plan and Chang-e's your bunny.

[cs94njw]

"The hope is that it will be able to accurately forecast well in advance the conditions which create that perfect smoggy storm."

Well, I'm no supercomputer, but I'd said this is due to billions of people all using crappy emission spouting cars/scooters, in a high-rise city.

[NomNomNom]

there is no evidence humans are responsible. There have been dust and other particles in the air for millions of years. It's sheer arrogance to imagine humans can make a blind bit of difference let alone stop these natural cycles.

[Cubical Drone]

Is that you Lewis?

[Alan Brown]

The problem has been around for a while

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_Dust says that similar events have been recorded as far back as AD174, but these smogs are becoming more frequent/deadly and it's fairly clear there's a human component to them

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asian_brown_cloud

It would be nice to think that eastern countries might look at the gross mistakes of western ones wrt pollution and use the lessons learned to avoid generating simliar catastrophes, but so far it seems that they're just using them as a set of instructions to make matters worse.

[Anonymous Coward]

while !EOF printf ("coal")

That was easy.

[loneranger]

Beyond the obvious causes

It isn't only dirty coal power plants and cars, they've got coal mines that have been on fire for a very long time, just pouring pollution and CO2 into the air, but they do nothing to stop it.

[DanceMan]

It's 2013 and they need a supercomputer to tell them where the crap in the air is coming from?

[Anonymous Coward]

Could it have anything to do with building all the world's shit and having no environmental policy?