Supercomputer guarantees more accurate weather reports
Lehtikuva / Martti Kainulainen The supercomputer may not ensure perfect holiday weather, but it helps to plan ahead.The new supercomputer of the Finnish Meteorological Institute will speed up the calculations for weather forecasts. The capacity of the supercomputer is 20 times larger than that of the current equipment, thanks to which even more accurate forecasts will be ready twice as fast as currently. The equipment provides also better possibilities for researching climate change and retracing the diffusion of radioactive substances.
The equipment, which will be built around the supercomputer, is designed and acquired by CSC - IT Center for Science, which will also operate as the specialist of the new system. CSC will optimize the weather model used by the researchers of the FMI so that it will operate as fast as possible on the new computer.
The computer is a model Cray XT5m, and its peak performance is over 34 teraflops, which means that it is capable of 34,000 billion calculations per second. The equipment has a total of 3936 AMD Opteron processor cores and 5,6 terabyte internal memory.
The equipment will be installed and taken into use still this year. CSC estimates that the capacity of the supercomputer will suffice for weather forecasting for the next four years.
CSC is a non-profit company providing IT support and resources for academia, research institutes and companies. It is administered by the Ministry of Education.
Invariably more and more efficient supercomputers take on the key position in making weather and climate forecasts. Thanks to the new, more effective high precision calculation, two-day weather forecasts can now be produced for the whole of Europe with a minimal 7,5 kilometer resolution. The current resolution is 16,5 kilometers.
In addition to weather forecasts the Finnish Meteorological Institute utilizes its supercomputer for carrying out research on global climate change and calculating the diffusion of different hazardous substances. The solution guarantees ever better chances for large research projects requiring high calculation efficiency.
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