Met Office bids for better outlook

The Meteorological Office, recently confirmed as the number one short-range weather forecaster in the world, has signed an agreement with NEC for a new supercomputer to achieve even better results.

The £27.5m deal involving an NEC SX-6 vector supercomputer was formally signed yesterday (25 July).

The system will be sited at the Met Office's new headquarters in Exeter. It is NEC's first supercomputer sale in the UK and its largest to date in Europe.

Alan Dickinson, the Met Office's director of numerical weather prediction, told vnunet.com: "The computer is the limiting resource."

He explained that the two main functions of the new system would be number-crunching for global and UK weather forecasting up to six days ahead, and climate change prediction (such as the effect of greenhouse gases) that could run to hundreds of years.

The Met Office is also looking to enlarge its business, making more use of the internet and providing tailored products using the latest digital technology. New satellites that will provide more, and more detailed, weather and climate information are due soon.

Dr Joerg Stadler, NEC European supercomputer systems marketing manager, said that the system would be implemented in two stages. In the first phase a 30-node, 240-processor system with 64GB per node is to be shipped by the end of the year, becoming live next spring.

"But NEC has committed to a performance level of 12.5 times what it is now by 2004. I cannot say what the exact amount of hardware to achieve that will be," he explained.

Both the old and new systems are Unix-based, but Stadler said there was some change to programs to run on a vector system with fewer processors than the two non-vector Cray T3E systems that used over 1,000 central processing units (CPUs).

The NEC's vector systems benefited from much greater peak CPU utilisation (30-60 per cent) than competitive systems using standard CPU (5-10 per cent), Stadler added.

The world's most powerful supercomputer is also an NEC SX-6, used in Japan's Earth Simulator project. It has 640 nodes comprising 5,120 processors to achieve 40 teraflops.