Berkeley Lab Researchers, Lenny Oliker, John Shalf, and Michael Wehner, propose a new breed of supercomputers, perhaps the most powerful special-purpose computer yet, for improving global climate predictions.

“We think scientific computing is ripe for a change. Instead of getting a big computer and saying, ‘What can we do? we want to do what particle physicists do and say, ‘We want to do this kind of science—what kind of machine do we need to do it?' ” says Michael Wehner, a climatologist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.