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

Re:Sparse on Technical Details

[Anonymous Coward]

The speed of these large supercomputers is based less on processors and more on the networking between the nodes. To have a linear response in performance at 13x the number of processors is pretty impressive capability.

Re:What difference will it make?

[Anonymous Coward]

this clearly doesn't benefit the UK economy.

Oh look, it's another small minded Little Endlander with their "I don't understand it, it doesn't benefit me directly and it costs money, so it must be bad". See also HS2.

It benefits the UK economy massively. It allows shipping & aircraft companies to make sensible decisions like "Should we have the snowplows on standby tonight?" and "Should we wait in port while that storm passes?". It benefits farmers by giving them more accurate long-range forecasts so they can plant and harvest more efficiently. It even benefits you directly by letting your council plan their road gritting better.

I'm sick and fucking tired of stupid, small minded people in this country with their stupid, ill informed opinions. The UK is the 6th largest economy in the world by the way; perhaps we could celebrate that fact instead of whining about "Oh no someone is spending money!" The last reported GDP was £1.5 TRILLION. £97m is chump change.

Re:What difference will it make?

[amck]

You do more than rescue. When you know the storm is coming you prepare ahead of time. With 3-5 days notice, Councils, police cancel overtime. All vehicles are out of the garage/repair shop. Priority on getting sandbags in place, clearing all drains and drain covers.

Then the general public are warned. Less events are on, or they are cancelled. Less people travel, everyones been to the shops two days before.

And away from storms, farmers know 5 days in advance what they're doing; warm humid weather means preparing for blight, etc. Less fertlilizers, less pesticides are wasted.

People still grumble about the bad weather, but harvests and lives aren't lost.