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G2: Pass notes: No 3,408: Supercomputer(Guardian (UK) Via Acquire Media NewsEdge) Age: Very, very new Mass: 140 tonnes Appearance: Lots of big black cabinets with flashing lights Kind of like an amusement arcade? Kind of, only a bit less amusing, and without the sticky carpet. It's actually a Cray XC40. The Met Office is going to join a few of them together to make a really good weather-predicting machine. Sounds like something they would do. Yes. Although I should stress that this time it's going to be a really, really good weather-predicting machine, 13 times faster than their current one. It'll cost pounds 97m and be able to deliver more accurate forecasts in the short, medium and long term, and for more precise locations. It'll help us to understand the real-life implications of climate change and save the economy a lot of money in weather disruption. Will it promise a barbecue summer before 14 weeks of drizzle? Much, much less often. So what does it actually do? Ooh, about 16 petaflops. And what does that mean? It can do 16 quadrillion calculations every second. And what does that mean? It can do 16,000,000,000,000,000 calculations every second. To be honest I kind of zone out after the first nine zeros. I know. A lot of people do that. The zeros are important, though. They mean that by the time the new machine is fully operational, in 2017, it'll be able to run a fresh model of the UK's weather every hour, rather than every three. Does it have a good camera on the back? Actually, I don't think it does. Although there is going to be a really massive hard drive with a storage capacity of 17 petabytes. That's the same as 265,625 posh iPhones. I bet it still gets filled up with thousands of slightly different versions of the same picture. Well, it is going to be processing changing weather patterns so yes, it probably will. Do say: The new machine is "enabled by a robust Intel(R) Xeon(R) processor road map, Aries high performance interconnect and flexible Dragonfly network topology, providing low latency and scalable global bandwidth to satisfy the most challenging multi-petaflop applications." Don't say: Just tell me when it's going to rain! (c) 2014 Guardian Newspapers Limited. |