Supercomputer to boost forecasting at Met Office

The Met Office readies its green supercomputer

The Met Office is preparing to migrate the supercomputer that underpins its ability to model global weather systems, with a new IBM Power6-based system set to come online this autumn.

The £33m IBM supercomputer will replace a five-year-old NEC SX-8 and will radically improve the Met Office’s ability to create complex climate models. The new IBM system is capable of undertaking 125 trillion calculations per second.

“The process of understanding the physics and chemistry of the atmosphere, relating observations with masses of data, is very IT intensive,” said Dave Underwood, deputy director of technology and information services at the Met Office.

Computer models are essential to the organisation’s ability to predict the weather. The Met Office uses multiple climate models to build forecast predictions, each one based on an abundance of observational data that will be processed by the IBM computer.

The infrastructure supporting the new system is designed to be as energy efficient as possible. The cabinet holding the IBM system is cooled using 15 litres of special coolant, and the extra heat produced by its nodes will help heat the building. The IT hall, which houses the computer, will use ambient cooling in the winter months to reduce air conditioning.

“We are going to make as much use of ambient air as we can,” said Underwood.
The IBM system is currently being used for training, and will take over the main computational task of climate modelling this autumn. The Met Office plans to use the NEC SX-8 supercomputer as a backup system.