Met Office signs Cray for £97m super, forecasts better forecasts

Internet Security Threat Report 2014

The UK's Met Office has settled on Cray as the vendor for its next supercomputer, with a 16 Tflop XC40 machine to be shared between sites in Exeter (in the Met HQ's IT Halls) and in Science Park (if that site gets planning permission).

The £97 million super will give the Met 13 times more supercomputing muscle than it is currently able to flex.

The Office wants to improve the detail of its forecasting, particularly for flooding, strong winds, fog and heavy snowfall.

The combination of high processing capacity and 20 PB of storage (when installation is complete) will also enable high-resolution forecasting. The Met says it could achieve resolution as fine as 300 metres in specialised forecasts, for example to model fog risk over airports.

“Scientists will also explore the benefits of adapting the resolution to improve UK winter forecasts out to months ahead”, the announcement says, as well as helping assess the regional impacts of climate change.*

Cray notes that the three-phase rollout will begin immediately, but the major system deliveries will take place between 2015 and 2017.

Other technical details of the machine include the Aries system interconnect; the Dragonfly network topology and DataWarp application I/O acceleration. Cray's Linux will be complemented with its HPC-optimised programming environments.

El Reg is pleased to see the Met Office adopting our formal system of measurement units, saying that the machine will weigh “the equivalent of 11 double-decker buses”. ®

Internet Security Threat Report 2014

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