16-Teraflops, £97m Cray To Replace IBM At UK Meteorological Office

Memetic writes: The UK weather forecasting service is replacing its IBM supercomputer with a Cray XC40 containing 17 petabytes of storage and capable of 16 TeraFLOPS. This is Cray's biggest contract outside the U.S. With 480,000 CPUs, it should be 13 times faster than the current system. It will weigh 140 tons. The aim is to enable more accurate modeling of the unstable UK climate, with UK-wide forecasts at a resolution of 1.5km run hourly, rather than every three hours, as currently happens. (Here's a similar system from the U.S.)

Comments

16 peta not tera FLOPS

[Anonymous Coward]

16 peta not tera FLOPS

Dude, you're getting a CRAY, also error in summary

[serviscope_minor]

16 TFlops ain't much to write home about. 480,000 CPUS? What are they? 6502s?

Turns out it's 16PFlops according to the BBC.

PetaFLOPS ffs

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot is getting worse by the minute.

Re:Cray?

[Required Snark]

It started out as Terra Computer Company.

Cray Computer

Cray Inc. is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. The company's predecessor, Cray Research, Inc. (CRI), was founded in 1972 by computer designer Seymour Cray. Seymour Cray went on to form the spin-off Cray Computer Corporation (CCC), in 1989, which went bankrupt in 1995, while Cray Research was bought by SGI the next year. Cray Inc. formed in 2000 when Tera Computer Company purchased the Cray Research Inc. business from SGI and adopted the name of its acquisition.

Sparse on Technical Details

[MoonlessNights]

I was interested in what the change-over was, which was causing the performance increase, and how old the existing system is. This information seems to be missing.

What is included actually sounds a little disappointing:
13x faster
12x as many CPUs
4x mass (3x "heavier")

I would have thought that there would be either a process win (more transistors per unit area and all that fun) or a technology win (switching to GPUs or other vector processors, for example) but it sounds like they are building something only marginally better per computational resource. I suppose that the biggest win is just in density (12x CPUs in 4x mass is pretty substantial) but I was hoping for a little more detail. Or, given the shift in focus toward power and cooling costs, what impact this change will have on the energy consumption over the old machine.

Then again, I suppose this isn't a technical publication so the headline is the closest we will get and it is more there to dazzle than explain.

Re:What difference will it make?

[jcupitt65]

UK weather forecasts have become much more accurate over the last few decades as the computers that do the forecasting have become more powerful. This new machine will continue that trend.

For many years we have verified our forecasts by comparing forecasts of mean sea-level pressure with subsequent model analyses of mean sea-level pressure. These comparisons are made over an area covering the North Atlantic; most of western Europe, and north-eastern parts of North America. From this long-term comparison an average forecast error can be calculated.

The graph shows how many days into a forecast period this average error is reached compared to a baseline in 1980. This graph shows that a three-day forecast today is more accurate than a one-day forecast in 1980.

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/7/2/capIndPlot-600.jpg

Re:16-Terraflops needed??

[Geeky]

You joke, but our weather has been getting less predictable. We had a fairly hot summer overall, but August was fairly wet and dull. September, on the other hand, was the driest on record, and October has mostly been warm. It's forecast to reach 20 degrees in London on Friday - if that was one day later, on the 1st of November, it would be challenging the record for the hottest November day recorded in the UK.

Monday and Tuesday were warm enough to sit outside on my lunch break, today it's raining and chilly, tomorrow it's back up to 19 degrees apparently.

Re:Dude, you're getting a CRAY, also error in summ

[tibit]

Of course the mention of 6502 was a joke, but let's see how close one could get. Let's say that you could get one FLOP in 1000 cycles on a legacy 6502. With 2MHz clock, we're talking 2kFLOPs per chip. With half a million of them, we get 1GFLOP. That's still 7 orders of magnitude away from where one needs to be... This tells us, indirectly, that the desktop processors we currently have are essentially the realm of 1980s science fiction :)