CIO Interview: Charles Ewen, CIO, Met Office

Ewen discusses supercomputers, and how the Met Office is trying to become "better, faster and cheaper"

Charles Ewen, CIO, the Met Office, talks to Computing about his organisation's new supercomputer, and how it helps to fulfill their objectives.

"Top of our agenda is transformation, it's all about better, faster and cheaper," said Ewen. "Like all organisations we have pressure for efficiencies. The Met Office is part of the government, and the situation with government-funded organisations is well documented. In the course of ou transformation, a chunk of that is delivering more for the same costs.

"The Met Office has an existing enterprise architecture that's constrained in terms of how fast it can move. So this is about how fast we can take cutting edge new developments in science and apply them to give citizens some kind of benefit.

"Better could refer to a whole gamut of things, but one of them is around the idea that weather has become very operational very quickly. It wasn't that long ago that the job of the science-domain supercomputers we ran at the Met office was such that a meteorologist could build a picture of the future state of the atmosphere and create a weather forecast.

"Now automation is a big thing for us, so the science has to be able to flow through the technology. There's a big element in that of resilience. And to be honest supercomputers haven't been born to be resilient, so there's a whole heap of challenges there to improve that aspect as we rely more and more on these automated forecasts."

Ewen was placed 7th in Computing's latest IT Leaders 100 rankings.