The supercomputer will also aid climate-modeling scientists, letting them see how global warming will affect specific regions of the UK compared to other parts of the world. The system will be built at the the Met Office HQ in Exeter and come on line in 2015, but won’t hit full steam until around 2017, according to the BBC. Cray’s XC40 is now its top-of-the-line commercial supercomputer, running on Intel Xeon chips with 16 petaflops of speed and 17 petabytes of storage. The Met sale is the largest it has ever made outside of the US.
Funding has been confirmed for a £97m supercomputer to improve the Met Office’s weather forecasting and climate modelling. The facility will work 13 times faster than the current system, enabling detailed, UK-wide forecast models with a resolution of 1.5km to be run every single hour, rather than every three. It will be built in Exeter during 2015 and become operational next September. The Met Office said it would deliver a “step change” in forecast accuracy. “It will allow us to add more precision, more detail, more accuracy to our forecasts on all time scales for tomorrow, for the next day, next week, next month and even the next century,” said Met Office chief executive Rob Varley. As well as running UK-wide and global forecasting models more frequently, the new technology will allow particularly important areas to receive much more detailed assessment.
