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Government agency will use Google Cloud H4D VMs to replace HPE Cray machines:
Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations.
In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in the process of moving its own weather prediction system to Microsoft Azure in a hybrid setup. Weather operations are typically run on in-house or government-funded supercomputer systems, which helps drive the HPC (high performance computing) market.
[...] The plan is to move NOAA's Weather and Climate Operational Supercomputing System, run by the National Weather Service (NWS) division, over to the cloud by December 2027, along with the software that generates NWS weather data for analysis.
The agency is hoping that the cloud will make model forecasting more nimble, resulting in earlier predictions and better warnings for all the extreme weather events that seem to keep occurring these days. It was the in-house systems that were holding things back, evidently.
"Cloud-based high-performance computing will accelerate the transition of research into operations by eliminating traditional bottlenecks of on-premise systems," said NOAA Administrator Neil Jacobs in a statement.
Jacobs noted that the cloud's flexibility for providing large amounts of compute is advantageous: the agency can ramp up cycles during tropical storm season, then wind them down during calmer periods.
[...] For the job, Google plans to use Google Cloud H4D VMs, built on AMD Epyc processors. Google labels these instances as "virtual machines" because they run under a hypervisor that integrates Google's networking and orchestration tools. As a result, they can be synchronized to run large jobs the same way supercomputers do.
According to Google, customers can access H4Ds for as low as 3 cents per core-hour without long-term commitments. For supercomputing jobs, they can also use Cluster Toolkit to deploy clusters and Cluster Director to maintain them. Google Cloud's Batch can handle the queuing, scheduling, and resource provisioning.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday August 05, @04:30PM (1 child)
> increase the costs by orders of magnitude.
Also increase the potential future utility of the structure for something other than a datacenter... vertical farms come to mind, particularly if there's abundant water available for evaporative uses.
> The only loss is the permanent destruction of the topsoil which was destroyed to make place for the buildings.
Typically they'll scrape the organics layers off when pouring a slab, but the slab itself isn't really permanent. Even the thickest concrete can be removed if you are determined enough. https://world-nuclear-news.org/articles/in-pictures-demolition-of-stade-reactor-building-progresses [world-nuclear-news.org]
🌻🌻🌻🌻✌️ [google.com]
(Score: 3, Informative) by canopic jug on Wednesday August 05, @06:45PM
Also increase the potential future utility of the structure for something other than a datacenter...
That's unfortunately not part of their profit equation. The scams (and they're all scams) made around data center construction have the construction itself as an end goal. Anything after that, from their perspective, is irrelevant. Thus the costs are minimized. They'd use cardboard if they could get away with it. Electricity supplies are addressed with a bit of mumbling and hand waving as they're externalities, from the perspective of the construction investor.
The company hiring the construction company and, to a much lesser extent, the construction company itself make a profit. Everyone else generally left holding the bag. If the community 'leaders' were crooked and/or naive enough to offer tax breaks, then they even end up losing a lot of money in the process.
Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.