German Met installs NEC vector super

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From news at HPCwire

One such national weather service is the German Meteorological Service, called Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD), based in Offenbach, Germany. Here, on the southern banks of the river Main, researchers work around the clock forecastings storms, rain and hail showers — weather conditions that usually arrive on very short notice. In order to make these seemingly unpredictable events somewhat less so, the German Meteorological Service has installed a new NEC supercomputer. The SX-9 is the most powerful vector computer in the industry, and the German Meteorological Service plans to use it to improve the accuracy of its predictions by a factor of 45, all by the year 2010.

…A Sun Fire X4600 M2 Linux cluster provides access to SX-9 system. The Sun cluster is where the meteorological data is pre-processed and collated depending on model calculation, maps or warnings.

The system employs dual StorageTek SL8500 tape libraries, each of which offers space for more than 10,000 magnetic tape cassettes. By 2012 the total volume should comprise around 40 petabytes