ACADEMIA

The new UK Met Office and Natural Environment Research Council high performance computer, MONSooN, has opened for business.

Hosted at the Met Office in Exeter, MONSooN is part of the Joint Climate Research Programme, a strategic partnership to improve collaboration between scientists funded by the two organisations.

At the heart of the MONSooN service is a 30-node IBM Power6 supercomputer with 960 cores, capable of 18 teraflops (18,000 billion calculations per second). As well as a common computing platform, the service will deliver a number of other features that will improve scientists' ability to collaborate, including post-processing capability, a fast data transfer link between MONSooN and UK universities, access to data archives held in Exeter, and a web and wiki server to enable collaborators to share data and ideas.

Andy Parsons, Manager of the Joint Climate Research Programme (JCRP), said, "MONSooN is a key piece of underpinning infrastructure for the JCRP. It will enable us to address two of the key objectives of the programme - ensuring that the UK has access to internationally competitive tools for forecasting climate and its impacts, and enabling closer collaboration between NERC and the Met Office. We're very excited at the potential of the new service and look forward to the science and policy benefits that MONSooN will bring."

MONSooN will be used for research into a number of modelling issues, including the representation of aerosols and ozone, the prediction of storms and increasing the resolution of climate models to give more accurate results. The output from the science carried out on MONSooN will primarily be used by policy makers, enabling them to make more informed and timely decisions on issues like adaptation to future climate change.