A £ 97 million supercomputer will predict the weather in your backyard

You can answer “lousy” to the question “What is the weather in the UK now” with an accuracy of 75%. But the British National Weather Service, Met Office, wants to predict the weather more accurately. Therefore, she invested 97 million pounds (this is 156 million dollars or more than 6.675 billion rubles) in the supercomputer Cray XC40. This 140-ton machine with 480 thousand processors is 13 times faster than the current system from IBM.

The advantage is that the system will be able to predict weather with a geographical accuracy of 1.5 kilometers. For the rest of the parameters, the system will also help to make forecasts more precisely - talking about wind, fog, ice and snowfall, which are essential for airports.
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The supercomputer will help scientists to model the climate, will allow to see the impact of global warming on specific regions of the UK.

The system will be built in the weather office and will be commissioned in 2015, but will work at full capacity in 2017. Cray XC40 will receive 16 petaflops speeds and 17 petabytes of disk space.