Slashdot Mirror
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.
Just breaking: Australian Prime minister Tony About-face reports that, in the interests of national security, the weather will no longer be reported, and the machinery will be turned over to the George Brandis / Australian Federal Police, where it will be used to monitor the internet (just meta-data) for unauthorized wind-mills.
If it acquires resources on instantiation like a duck, then its a shared_ptr<Duck>
... but here in the UK our Met Office sometimes can't even get it right 12 hours in advance. I'm not blaming them for that because the point i'm making is it doesn't matter how powerful the computer, if you don't have enough data and/or the software model isn't good enough then the hardware won't make much difference especially when chaos theory is working against you all the time too.
It seems that the more Australia's BoM relies on computer modelling the worse their predictions become. Honestly the predictions of 15-20 years ago were more accurate than the BoM has been able to produce in the last decade or so.