Cray To Build Australia's Fastest Supercomputer

Bismillah writes: US supercomputer vendor Cray has scored the contract to build the Australian Bureau of Meteorology's new system, said to be capable of 1.6 petaFLOPS and with an upgrade option in three years' time to hit 5 petaFLOPS. From the iTnews story: "The increase in capacity will allow the BoM to deal with growth in the 1TB of data it collects every day, which it expects to increase by 30 percent every 18 months to two years. It will also allow the agency to collect new areas of information it previously lacked the capacity for. 'The new observation platforms that are coming online are bringing quite a lot more data,' supercomputer program director Tim Pugh told iTnews.

Comments

Re:I don't know about Aus weather forecasts

[DanJ_UK]

Yes but here in the UK we have the Atlantic, the gulf stream, the jet stream, warm air pushed up from the continent and cold air being pushed down from the north sea all meeting conveniently right at the UK, I'm surprised we can predict an hour ahead in the UK let alone 24 hours in advance.

With all these dynamics converging in one place it makes sense that we're building a 16 petaflops supercomputer to replace the current one the UK met office uses.

The new system will be housed partly at the Met Office headquarters in Exeter and partly at a new facility in the Exeter Science Park, and will reach its full capacity in 2017.

At that point, its processing power will be 16 petaflops - meaning it can perform 16 quadrillion calculations every second .

The "Cray XC40" machine will have 480,000 central processing units or CPUs, which is 12 times as many as the current Met Office supercomputer, made by IBM. At 140 tonnes, it will also be three times heavier.

That kind of makes my eyes bleed / head hurt to think about.