The UK's Met Office has just announced
that it's taking delivery of a new $150 million supercomputer—one that
will be able to predict the weather accurately enough to know what it
will be like on the very road you live on.
The
new device is a Cray XC40 supercomputer with 480,000 CPUs, that can
perform 16,000 trillion calculations per second and weighs 154 tons. It
replaces an ageing IBM system and will predict the weather with some
crazy levels of precision.
Firstly,
it will be able to predict the weather at hourly intervals at a
resolution of 1 mile, allowing for fine-grained weather variation over
entire cities. But more impressive is that it can also provide weather
predictions at unprecedented levels of precision—with a resolution of
300m. That's down to street level.
The Met Office suggests
that such intense computation will be reserved for predicting things
like the timing of fog over airports—so what will it do the rest of the
time? Actually, when it gets a break from weather predictions, it'll be put to work by climate-modeling scientists to see how climate changes is affecting the UK.
The new computer will arrive in the UK's Exeter offices soon—but won't hit its full stride until some time in 2017. [Met Office via Engadget]
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