The EU wants 20,000 GPUs to run a simulated digital twin of Earth. Can we add an RTX 3080 to that order? | PC Gamer - hurlbutmonatur

The EU wants 20,000 GPUs to run a simulated digital Twin Falls of Earth. Can we add an RTX 3080 to that order?

Racks of graphics cards being used for cryptocurrency mining

(Figure credit: Getty, NiseriN)

The European Union wants 20,000 GPUs to build a machine capable of running a ample artificial digital twin of Worldly concern. Rag the back of the line, bois. You know there's a artwork card crisis going on, decent? Though I have found a GTX 1660 Super for $800, if that helps.

Sadly, Destination Earth (or DestinE A the cool kids call it) isn't departure to constitute the mankind's most elaborate MMO, or some digital live service version of The Amazing Wash, but a "countertenor-precision digital model of the Earth to monitor and simulate natural and act."

That full, GPU-heavy simulation is the end-goal for the project, which will bring together multiple 'digital twins' of the Earth, with to each one model simulating a different part of the planet's systems. Meteorology and climate change, food and water security, global ocean circulation, and the biogeochemistry of the oceans are all examples proposed by the scientists running the project.

Rather ominously IT's also being used "on a global scale to speed up the green transition and help plan for starring environmental abasement and disasters." Because those, sadly, are active to be inevitable.

The plan for the Fate simulations is to have them to feed information into the EU's efforts to get on carbon neutral by 2050 and help inform its environmental strategies going forward. It's all part of a $1.2tn (€1tn) investment in the axis's green technologies.

As well as received modelling it will grant users to make different scenarios and see what happens if certain parameters are changed, both in the short term and over an extended time period. The European Commission says that initially DestinE will only dish up public authorities, but will eventually be opened up to serve the wider scientific and industrial communities.

Blue-lit room surrounded by computer servers — (Image deferred payment: Getty, imaginima)

And to get all that information modelled as precisely as its scientists need it's currently estimated that they'll need at least four times the computational power currently inside the Cray Piz Daint supercomputer in Zurich. That's a machine with more 5,000 Pascal-powered Nvidia Tesla P100 GPUs, which in go agency the scientists need to credit crunch around 20,000 graphics chips into the final supercomputer to finagle such a elaborated Earthly pretending.

And it's definitely going to be used for science, not a adroit ploy for the EU to build the biggest Ethereum mining rig known to humankind. Absolutely not.

As anyone who's paid attention to the trials of cryptocurrency mining knows, that kind of frame-up is also expiration to postulate a totally lot of juice to power it, with estimates putt information technology at some 20MW. And if that's built in a placement which uses supposed 'dirty' ability, the feigning itself will be conducive a huge amount of CO2 into the atmosphere simply by its own operation. It will indigence to be located in a place where renewable energy is plentiful to ward of being a trouble that it's possess process force is attempting to resolve.

Thankfully the EU hoarding some 20,000 GPUs isn't going to happen instantly. The plan is for the seven to x twelvemonth project to complain off this year with a smaller effect platform, with the launch of a cloud-based political program and the first two digital twins in 2023.

Still, better luck sourcing those chips, guys.

Dave has been gaming since the years of Zaxxon and Noblewoman Pester connected the Colecovision, and code books for the Commodore Vic 20 (Death Race 2000!). He collective his first gaming Personal computer at the tender long time of 16, and at last finished bug-fixing the Cyrix-settled organization more or less a year later. When he dropped it out of the windowpane. Helium first started writing for Official PlayStation Magazine and Xbox World many another decades agone, then moved onto PC Format regular, and so PC Gamer, TechRadar, and T3 among others. Forthwith atomic number 2's rearwards, writing about the nightmarish nontextual matter card commercialize, CPUs with more cores than signified, gaming laptops hotter than the sun, and SSDs more large than a Cybertruck.