European Weather Forecasting Center Sticks with IBM

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IBM today announced a contract with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to upgrade the center’s High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) with two new POWER6 clusters, each with a peak performance of about 145 teraflops. The new systems will replace the current POWER5+ clusters. The contract also establishes a roadmap to the next phase of IBM HPC deployments in 2011, presumably with POWER7 technology.

According to Caroline Isaac, Deep Computing Business Unit Executive, IBM United Kingdom, Ireland and South Africa:

In 2008 IBM will provide ECMWF with new IBM POWER6 supercomputer systems that are five times more powerful than the currently installed supercomputers. This will help ECMWF to make significant improvements in medium-term weather forecasts through higher resolution models of weather systems and the capability to process massive amounts of data. By 2011 ECMWF will receive a further doubling of performance and will be one of the first organisations worldwide to use IBM’s planned future High Performance Computing technologies.

The complete announcement can be found here.