I guess this is not unrelated to the ECMWF departing Reading for Bologna <a href="https://www.ecmwf.int/en/learning/workshops/ecmwf-bologna-2020-panel-discussion" rel="nofollow">https://www.ecmwf.int/en/learning/workshops/ecmwf-bologna-20...</a>
One interesting fact that I learned from Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, is that weather forecasting is a four-dimensional problem (space + time), so to produce a forecast that is twice as detailed requires approximately 16x the computing resources. Historically, the resolution of weather forecasts has doubled roughly every eight years, in line with with Moore's Law.
Ah - I momentarily forgot that the Met Office is in a country where “pound” is a measurement of money, not weight.<p>This made me curious. Apparently supercomputers can weigh 1 million pounds [0]. So a billion pound supercomputer in the US would be ~1000x more powerful than a billion pound supercomputer in the UK and cost a few percent of GDP to build.
Seems there is not much information yet on the actual hardware. Quick search found this:<p><a href="https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/17/hpes-cray-tapped-build-massive-1-6b-weather-supercomputer-uk/" rel="nofollow">https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/17/hpes-cray-tapped-build-m...</a><p>Eventually reaching 145 PFlops<p>The Met Office didn’t share further hardware details other than the fact that the supercomputer will incorporate graphics processing cards.
There are also some voices that attribute bad local weather forecasts to closed weatherstations and errorprone digital replacements to manual measurements... But hey, new supercomputers are cool!
The Omega Tau podcast did an interesting episode about weather modeling at the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts<p><a href="https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ecmwf/" rel="nofollow">https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-e...</a>
Interesting they’re talking about colocating it in EEA countries. I see the rationale for Iceland and Norway, but why specify them as EEA? Is there a post-Brexit strategic angle to this? (considering the large sum of public money involved)
I'm surprised to see a supercomputer cross the 1 billion pound/euro/dollar mark.<p>Previous recent supercomputers seem to have cost in the low nine figures.<p>I realize the price tag includes a decade of operation but that still seems like quite a leap.
A previous Met Office supercomputer purchase was discussed here:
<a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519820" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519820</a>