Mile high rock pie.
Wednesday, 16. September 2009, 15:05:32
Who were the groupies?
"Founded in 1960 by a group of US universities and sponsored by the National Science Foundation, the National Centre for Atmospheric Reseach at Boulder, Colorado, uses satellites, high altitude weather balloons, research aircraft and a worldwide network of field stations to try to keep track of the atmosphere's every move.
Much of the data from these various sources is sooner or later digested by one great organiser -"An huge high speed computer capable of performing 80 million operations per second"
The computer laboured 60 hours to produce a crude, 10 year projection of climate trends..."
Oy, wait... I can sell them a good "desk top" they could use. It's not that old. I'd trade it in for images of the north Pacific and Atlantic sea surface level air pressures spanning the last 5 decades.
Good ones!
I'd show you something good.
I'll show you something good.
When you open your dat to make a new stat
And your tumbling world comes apart.
The quote was from the series Planet Earth. Not the BBC video but a book issued by Time-Life in 1983.
WIDGETIZE
Weatherlawyer # 14. September 2009, 15:24
The MET Office's main tool to forecast weather in the UK has been branded as one of the worst polluters in the public sector in the United Kingdom.
The computer, an IBM P-Series model, was purchased by the Meterological organisation for the rather impressive sum of £33 million back in May last year. In comparison, the MET Office new headquarters cost £80 million.
It consumes a staggering 1.2 Megawatts of energy and and that amount of power could power a small town. It also leaves a huge carbon footprint given the fact that it runs 24 hours a day - it takes eight weeks to boot up - and accounts for 75 percent of the Met Office's building.
In terms of hardware, it uses the same processor as a Playstation 3, the Cell Broadband Engine, together with 13TB worth of memory and an array of hard disk drives totalling 550TB.
All of this to run the MET's intricate simulations more precisely using the organisation's proprietary Unified Model code.
Incredibly, the 5-year contract signed by the MET means that the computer system will only be ready by 2011 when it will be 30 times more powerful than the organisation's current computer but will only be the second most powerful in the country.
When it is completed, the computer is expected to top one one quadrillion floating point operations per second or one Petaflop, churning enough data for 400 scientists.
Our Comments
IBM's Roadrunner, the world's fastest supercomputer currently 1.1 Petaflop, is in operation at the Department of Energy, Los Alamos National Laboratory, New Mexico, USA. In 2011, IBM will launch Sequoia which has a targeted performance of 20 Petaflops
Read more: http://www.itproportal.com/portal/news/article/2009/8/29/inside-met-office-weather-supercomputer/showall/#ixzz0R5uewcNb
And from Google news:
Ethiopian Review - Asrat Kebede - 20 hours ago
The new system has the capability of running at about 70 TFLOPS (trillion calculations per second), which puts it somewhere near the 50th most powerful
CNET News - Don Reisinger - Sep 9, 2009
The primary IBM supercomputer is now called Stratus. Its backup is dubbed Cirrus. The new supercomputers, based on IBM Power 575 Systems, are capable of ...Met Office supercomputer caught in environmental storm
Computing - Dave Bailey - Aug 28, 2009
... a contract with IBM for a new System-p model supercomputer capable of peak performance of 125 trillion floating point operations per second (flops). ...Supercomputer Doubles Power
Maui Weekly - Cindy Schumacher - Sep 2, 2009
“It is this unique combination of the 103 TeraFLOPS [103 x 1012 Floating Point Operations per second] of super computing power, dedicated staff and strong ...Desch Supercomputer Supports Intelligence, Reconnaissance ...
Scientific Computing - Aug 31, 2009
Desch has been benchmarked at 23 trillion floating point operations per second, currently making it number 308 on the official list of the 500 fastest ...Calming the wakefield
International Science Grid This Week - Sep 9, 2009
... a US Department of Energy supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory that can perform up to 1.64 quadrillion operations per second. ...
http://news.google.co.uk/news/search?aq=f&um=1&ned=uk&hl=en&q=super+computer++%7Eoperations+per+second%22