The BBC is reporting that the UK's Met office are buying a new £97Million Supercomputer.
The Met Office is the UK's national weather service agency, responsible for forecasting and climate modelling. The new machine will be built around the Cray XC40.
The "Cray XC40" machine will have 480,000 central processing units or CPUs, which is 12 times as many as the current Met Office supercomputer, made by IBM. At 140 tonnes, it will also be three times heavier.
It marks the biggest contract the Cray supercomputing firm has secured outside the US.
"It will be one of the best high-performance computers in the world," Science Minister Greg Clark told journalists at the announcement, adding that it would "transform the analytical capacity of the Met Office".
This story is also covered at The Guardian and The Independent.
From The Guardian:
The new computer will allow the Met Office to run 1.5km forecasts routinely, updating them every hour. It will also allow forecasters to zoom-in on particular regions to produced highly detailed forecasts. These will have resolutions of just 300m and can be useful for predicting fog at airports, or warning locations at particular risk from flooding.
(Score: 3, Funny) by Dunbal on Tuesday October 28 2014, @09:51PM
I can imagine the program to run it:
main(){
printf("80% chance of rain today");
}
(Score: 4, Funny) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:09PM
Nope.
main() {
printf("Same today as yesterday.");
}
70% accurate.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by M. Baranczak on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:54PM
Don't make this computer too smart, or it'll self-destruct from sheer despair.
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday October 29 2014, @08:41AM
Giving a percentage chance of rain would be a vast and easy improvement for the Met Office to make. One of their biggest problems is that they make statements like "it will rain tomorrow", and then when it doesn't people think they are idiots who don't have a clue what the weather is going to do. If they gave the percentage chance like they do in other countries people would just think they were lucky.
I'm not sure why the UK doesn't give the odds. It seems strange to me, like the either think we are too dumb to understand simple percentages or they don't like to admit they are uncertain, even if it means being wrong much of the time.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 1) by yarp on Wednesday October 29 2014, @12:19PM
Hmm? The chance of rain is given as "Precipitation probability": http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/public/weather/forecast/gcj2x8gt4 [metoffice.gov.uk]
(Score: 2) by mojo chan on Wednesday October 29 2014, @01:04PM
In a hidden-by-default drop down. The main way people get weather data is from TV or radio reports provided by the Met Office. On those they never give probabilities, at most qualifying their statements a little with words like "probably" and "maybe".
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 29 2014, @06:19PM
Hey! Put a new line in there! In good practice, main should always return an int value (exit value) and shouldn't have void arguments. Even if you aren't using them. Conforms better to the C standard.
#include
int main(int argc, const char* argv[]){
printf("80% chance of rain today.\n");
return 0;
}
This isn't weather science, dammit!
(Score: 5, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Tuesday October 28 2014, @10:11PM
New Supercomputer for UK Weather
To clarify, given that this comes from the land of James Bond and his associated villains, and also the real Avengers [wikipedia.org], that this machine is for predicting the weather, not controlling it.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 2) by frojack on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:33PM
Be Seeing You [youtube.com]
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 2) by black6host on Tuesday October 28 2014, @11:51PM
That was my favorite line from the article. Obviously talking about the weather is what most people do and these folks are going to rule that game. Might even be right, some of the time, I suppose. Apparently that's not as important as being able to talk about it though :)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @01:42AM
I thought they went down when Seymour C. passed away many years ago.
I guess these outfits are like shipyards - you don't need many customers or sales to stay in business, just a few really big ones.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 29 2014, @06:35PM
No Slowdown in Sight for Supercomputer Maker Cray [hpcwire.com]
(Score: 2) by LoRdTAW on Wednesday October 29 2014, @06:48PM
Cray was bought out by SGI after SGI started to lose the high end unix desktop market to cheap intel boxes running NT and dedicated graphics cards. At the time they also made HPC's and they figured that buying Cray would help them dominate the HPC market but again lost to cheap beowulf clusters of Intel/AMD machines (a few also ran DEC/Compaq Alpha CPU's). SGI just couldn't keep itself afloat as they put too much into the high end unix workstation markets that were drying up fast. They tried to push into the cheap Wintel/Linux markets with workstations and servers but it didn't work. Too little too late. They also made a last ditch effort to move Irix to Itanium for server/HPC and workstation but again, too little, too late. There is also talk of mismanagement and wasteful spending in the later years which lead to its demise.
They spun off Cray and went into a death spiral until rackable bought the remains and took the SGI name. They still make HPC's and high end servers though based on Intel and Linux. One benefit is they can still make large "single image systems" with many sockets thanks to their expertise in NUMA interconnects and networking. They seem to want to focus on big data, large scale cloud and storage platforms. A far cry from their beginnings as a hollywood graphics powerhouse. Once again they are competing with Cray.
Cray stays afloat because they are experts in HPC's and they handle the whole nine yards. Building a supercomputer is a quite a task. It is not simply "buying a few thousand dell rack servers, infiniband/10gbe adapters and net booting linux". There is major construction involved, electrical and HVAC contracting, and the hardware installation itself. A really big, BIG job. You call Cray and they handle it all plus they also provide the software, tuned compilers, libraries and development support. All you do is write a really big check and after a while you have a super computer up and running. Plus they also have their own proprietary interconnect hardware and processing nodes that are fine tuned for the job. You would be surprised how hard it is to scale out before you hit bottlenecks in your network and burning CPU cycles for silly things like networking and synchronization. They know how to solve those problems.