What a marvelous final day in Geneva - spent with Dr.Bob Bishop and his wife, Yoshima. Bob, former CEO of Silicon Graphics, has spent 40 years in technical and scientific computing and is now spearheading an ambitious initiative to raise multimillions of dollars to create the International Centre for Earth Simulation. It will house a supercomputer capable of modeling the whole earth and simulating its behavior. This means climate and geo-modeling, integrating the natural sciences and sociology-economic sciences. I met him when he visited the demo of the World Resource Simulation Center last September in San Diego, which is a smaller, but significant, project that will complement the ICES and provide it data.I was pleased to get an update on his progress. He is on the go constantly, lecturing widely and traveling to explain his concept and elicit support. Given the need to amass data from all over the world, Bob has selected Geneva as the home for the Centre--drawing upon many of the international organizations already there and winning worldwide cooperation because of Switzerland's history of neutrality. He is currently negotiating for a site where he hopes to break ground in a year.
His vision includes the building of a computer with power similar to any of the top ten in the world - able to process about one million billion floating point operations (I.e. petaflop) and deal with extabytes (billion billions bytes) of data. This will serve this worldwide organization for climate science to predict the occurrence of natural disasters such as tsunamis and hurricanes.
We visited over a lovely lunch at the Dumaine Imperial golf club in Gland, a small Swiss town-become bedroom community to Geneva. We ate on the patio of a mansion built by Napolean III overlooking Lake Geneva - with a view of the snow caps of Mount Blanc and surrounding French hills. The house is steeped in history, illustrated with paintings and portraits, and faces on colorful flower gardens, a rich green golf course and a lush evergreen forest.Bob and Yoshima have lived in five US cities and five countries - including 30 years in Switzerland. As a result of his experiences and his keen grasp of history and current events, provided us with great perspective on life in Europe. Among other things, he confirmed our recognition of the extraordinary engineering expertise in Switzerland.
After lunch we stopped at Nyon, another suburban small town with its own character. This town is distinguished by its picturesque castle - now a great place for special occasions. As we stood in the castle, overlooking the town (imaging ourselves to be the count of the region!), a wedding came to do their photos.That lovely and stimulating afternoon marked the end of our trip to Switzerland - and what a great trip it has been!
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