ACADEMIA

EXETER, UK -- The Met Office today announced that it has signed a contract with the NEC Corporation to purchase NEC’s next generation supercomputer. By March 2004, a supercomputer made up of 30 NEC SX-6 nodes will be running at the Met Office's new HQ site in Exeter. This will deliver approximately six times the combined power of the Met Office's two current Cray T3E computers. A year later, more nodes will be added, taking the total power available to twelve and a half times the current system. The agreement demonstrates the long-term confidence of the Met Office in NEC’s ability to deliver ground-breaking computing solutions. With weather forecasts benefiting from the extra power, climate models run by the supercomputer will provide improved predictions of high-impact climate changes, building on data available from a new generation of satellites. Climate change predictions will become even more authoritative through increases in resolution, representation of new processes and the use of ensemble predictions to provide risk assessments. Alan Dickinson, Director of Numerical Weather Prediction for the Met Office, said: "The upgrade will allow us to use higher-resolution models with improved computational and physical processing, enabling us to get more accurate forecasts of both near, current weather and longer-term climate trends." In 2000 a project was set up to ensure that the Met Office maintains the capability it requires, and it identified a need for upgrades in 2003 and 2006, during which time the organisation will be moving from its current headquarters to purpose-built offices in Exeter. Alan Dickinson continued: “This deal gives a clear statement about the Met Office's commitment to remain the acknowledged world leader in both numerical weather prediction and prediction of climate change over the coming years, and should ensure that our new facilities at Exeter remain at the cutting edge.” Tadashi Watanabe, Vice President of NEC Solutions, added: "We are delighted to be providing the Met Office with the best super-solution possible, further enhancing its outstanding predictor capabilities. With close to 100 units of this new series of supercomputers sold in the last nine months, this is a landmark deal for NEC.” The SX-6 Series from NEC delivers a high sustained performance for large-scale computations. To deliver approximately six times the combined power of the Met Office's two current Cray T3E computers, NEC will install 240 processors of the SX-6 Series in parallel. Each has peak vector performance of 8 Gigaflop/s (Gigaflop/s: one billion floating point operations per second), which is the fastest technical processor available. The high throughput performance of the SX-6 Series is achieved by employing ultra-high-speed Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and state-of-the-art LSI technology. Large memory and high data transfer rates between memories and CPUs are very important for obtaining high sustained performance for large-scale computations.