MET Office chiefs unveiled Britain’s most powerful super-computer – then admitted it still won’t guarantee an accurate weather forecast.
Steve Foreman
The £30million system has 15million megabytes of memory and is more powerful than 100,000 PCs. It uses 1.2 megawatts of electricity – enough to power a small town – and is housed in special halls the size of two football pitches.
The IBM computer was switched on this week at Met Office HQ in Exeter, Devon, but will take TWO MONTHS to fully boot up. And it won’t reach its peak performance of one petaflop – 1,000billion calculations per second – until 2011.
It will feed data to 400 scientists. The Met Office says it will help save millions of lives by predicting events such as hurricanes and aiding research on climate change.
Chief technology officer Steve Foreman said: “We can never predict the weather 100 per cent accurately, but this will help considerably.”
via The Sun.
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