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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.)
16 peta not tera FLOPS
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.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
What, are you suggesting they fucking read the articles they're going to post? Or more absurdly yet, be broadly informed about the general goings on in technology?
One might even imagine that this headline, the weekly articles about the latest multi-teraflop figures from single GPUs, and some working synapses might have raised a SIGREDFLAG or something.
Slashdot is getting worse by the minute.
Those guys are still around? I thought they were all eaten by dinosaurs. How many times have they gone bankrupt now?
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I miss the days when supercomputers looked super. This one looks like a row of drinks machines.
As a British nerd my 2 favourite topics of conversation are the weather and super computers, so this is exciting news.
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.
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.
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/image/7/2/capIndPlot-600.jpg
And neither mentions the CPU architecture, but if you go to the product brochure then you learn that they're Intel Xeon E5s (which doesn't narrow it down much). Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s, but perhaps most of the compute is supposed to be done on the (unnamed, vaguely referenced) accelerators.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Does it run Linux?
Not mentioned in TFA, and I haven't seen anyone talk about it yet in the comments here. Or maybe the answer is so obviously 'yes' that nobody even talks about it anymore.
I am not really here right now.
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.
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.
Sigs are so 1990s. No way would I be seen dead with one.
Yes, it runs linux.
Cray Linux® Environment (includes SUSE Linux SLES11, HSS and SMW software)
Extreme Scalability Mode (ESM) and Cluster Compatibility Mode (CCM)
system specs
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 :)
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
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.
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.
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist