Supercomputer to improve UK weather
Well, it's been a rubbish summer
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The Met Office, home of UK weather forecasting, is getting a shiny new supercomputer from IBM.
The £33m contract with IBM, which covers maintenance, support and a mid-life upgrade, will run until 2013. The machine should have total peak performance of 1 Petaflop by 2011 - some 30 times more powerful than the Met's current supercomputer, a cluster of NEC SX-8 machines which replaced a Cray in 2004.
The new cluster should improve weather forecasting and allow more use of "ensembles" - multiple simultaneous forecasts which make it easier to give earlier warnings of "low probability, high-impact weather".
The Met Office will also use the machine for researching climate change. A discrete part of the machine will be used for collaborative research along with the Natural Environment Research Council.
Once up and running the computer is expected to be the second most powerful in the UK, behind the University of Edinburgh's Hector machine. It will also be in the top 20 supercomputers worldwide. ®
COMMENTS
@AC
How do you come to think that I work there? The only reason why you'd know who works at the Met Office is if you work there.
So which is it? Unemployed or Met Office with a grudge?
Oh, BTW, you're wrong.
PS: Queries
Why is the AC so concerned about people working for the Met Office? Why do they consider working for the Met Office bad? Why do they jump to conclusions about people working for the Met Office (especially when they are wrong)?
Stephen kept saying that it didn't matter who he worked for, he was just a physicist who was concerned and interested. Well, I'm an astrophysicist and concerned and interested. My fourth year project was modeling the boundary layer of a white dwarf accreting binary, so I know a *little* about fluid dynamics in discrete models.
So why is it important to some people to tell everyone someone works for the Met Office? Even if I DID work for them, why would that make a difference?
"Ignorant arrant twattery detected. Scorn missiles launched. Fuckwit."
In your imagination - you're a superhero!
So hello again, Mark from the Met Office. Er, Climate Center?
It makes me feel good to know my taxes are going towards non-productive labour who can sit at a PC and type insults to El Reg readers all day. Twattery at the public's expense.
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