NIWA Shopping for New Super

niwaThe New Zealand National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research is out shopping for a new supercomputer to replace their current platform, a Cray T3E.  The current gear was rated the fastest machine in the southern hemisphere and the 60-th fastest in the world when it was installed back in June of 1999.  According to the report, its one of only two T3E’s believed to still be in operation.  NIWA is looking to increase their computational capability by 100 times the current platform.  The bump in performance will allow the group the greatly increase their extreme weather and climate change prediction capabilities.

We definitely have the workload to exercise such a machine.

“It will let us forecast weather and the impact of weather much more accurately and that is primarily because we could make better use of observational data coming out of satellites that require 60 to 70 times the capacity we have today.” [said Principal Scientist Michael Uddstrom]

Housed at the NIWA site in Greta Pt in Wellington, the new super was a part of a $58million three-year capital investment program approved last year.  For more info, read the full article here.