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

And the U.S. falls further behind

[PineHall]

The current NWS computer is only capable of 0.21 petaflops. There is an upgrade to bring it up to 0.8 petaflops, After Sandy (1.5 years ago) Congress gave money for a new computer but nothing seems to be happening with that money. Sandy's forecast was good not because of the American forecasts but because of the European forecast. I believe American forecasts were wrong in predicting Sandy's direction because America lacks of a decent supercomputer for forecasting.