It takes a lot of computer power to predict where an ocean storm will hit, how high the storm surge will be, and the damage that will ensue. The process starts when meteorologists collect thousands of data points from buoys, satellites, ships, and other sources. The data describe surface water temperature, winds, relative humidity, […]

“You can’t conceive of how big it is until you see it,” said Daryl Williams, director of the Minority Entrepreneurshp Program at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation. “As bad as New Orleans was, Mississippi was worse. I drove 75 miles and everything was literally flattened. When I got back to the office, I […]

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is clean and new, well designed and well funded. It sits at the edge of the University of Illinois’s main campus (UIUC), on the border of Champaign and Urbana. Its first floor auditorium is as wired as wired can be. I am sitting with about 40 […]