New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
29-10-2014, 15:22
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#1
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New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
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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.
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Will enable more detailed forecasts to be run hourly instead of every 3 hours.
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29-10-2014, 15:31
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#2
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The Invisible Woman
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
Hope so because currently I'm better off just using seaweed. 
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29-10-2014, 15:37
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#3
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
They should have just used Amazon EC2
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29-10-2014, 15:45
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#4
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
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Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
They should have just used Amazon EC2
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I'd imagine the Met Office want their own system without being reliant on an outside supplier (in case of failure etc). Also, I'd assume the fact that until 2011 they were part of the MoD means they tend to want to do everything "in-house".
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29-10-2014, 16:00
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#5
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
Amazon would be more reliable anyway since their datacentres are spread across multiple continents, instead of having a single point of failure being that of one datacentre.
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29-10-2014, 16:20
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#6
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
True, but I bet there are data security and probably legal implications regarding the Met Office "subbing out" its modelling work. Also, I would imagine that their utilisation of their own cluster would make it cost effective.
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29-10-2014, 16:31
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#7
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
Possibly. But how much top secret data can there be in... weather predictions... Or is that just what they want you to think it's for? :-P
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29-10-2014, 17:06
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#8
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
You'd be surprised how closely some forecasters guard their models etc.
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29-10-2014, 17:57
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#9
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
I wish they'd spend a fraction of that on getting their website to run at a reasonable pace. It's painfully slow particularly on the recent weather pages.
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31-10-2014, 11:40
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#10
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
Quote:
Originally Posted by rhyds
You'd be surprised how closely some forecasters guard their models etc.
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Still not sure why it'd be confidential, unless it's nuclear fallout modelling...
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31-10-2014, 11:58
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#11
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
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Originally Posted by qasdfdsaq
Still not sure why it'd be confidential, unless it's nuclear fallout modelling...
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Same reason any other industry guards their trade secrets, money.
The weather industry is a rather lucrative one, and without the advantage of having modelling that others don't have, I doubt the Met can afford a £97 million HPC!
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31-10-2014, 14:42
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#12
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
Industry and trade secrets don't apply to public agencies funded by public money though, often the opposite - in some jurisdictions any academic research funded by public money must be fully published openly and all data made available freely under open access for example.
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31-10-2014, 14:48
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#13
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
The Met Office does provide some services on a commercial basis I believe.
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31-10-2014, 15:01
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#14
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Re: New £97m supercomputer for Met Office
Quote:
Originally Posted by rhyds
The Met Office does provide some services on a commercial basis I believe.
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And are run as such too, they have to be commercially viable as part of their mandate and actually are profitable.
This wouldn't be the case if they acted like a "normal" scientific research group, although I certainly see where you're coming from qasdfdsaq
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