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

Posted by Soulskill on from the crayzy-powerful dept.

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.)

6 of 125 comments (clear)

  1. 16 peta not tera FLOPS by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    16 peta not tera FLOPS

  2. Dude, you're getting a CRAY, also error in summary by serviscope_minor · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.
  3. As a British nerd by ssam · · Score: 4, Funny

    As a British nerd my 2 favourite topics of conversation are the weather and super computers, so this is exciting news.

    1. Re:As a British nerd by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      You don't like trains? Weirdo!

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
  4. Re:What difference will it make? by jcupitt65 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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

  5. And the U.S. falls further behind by PineHall · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.