NEC LX Supercomputer coming to Czech Hydrometeorological Institute

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Today NEC Corporation announced that the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (CHMI) will soon deploy an NEC LX series supercomputer for weather forecasting.

We are very happy that CHMI has selected NEC to deliver an HPC solution for their weather and climate simulations, as NEC has a very special expertise in meteorological applications. For years, we have been successfully collaborating with meteorological institutes, and we look forward to cultivating these partnerships further,” said Andreas Gottlicher, Senior Sales Manager, NEC Deutschland.

NEC’s scale-out LX series HPC cluster will enable the Czech Hydrometeorological Service to increase the accuracy of numerical weather forecasting and related applications, namely warning systems. Weather prediction models are increasingly complex, including rainfall, temperature, wind and related variables that have to be calculated as precisely as possible several days in advance. At the same time, regional peculiarities such as orography and terrain physiography need to be considered. In addition, the public must be made aware quickly of predictions of high impact weather events affecting daily life, including environmental risks linked to air pollution. High-performance computing is therefore needed for running and completing weather and climate simulation jobs in time.

System Details

  • NEC will deliver the computational power of more than 300 nodes, connected through a high-speed Mellanox EDR InfiniBand network and containing the new Intel Xeon E5-2600 v4 product family dual socket compute nodes, with a total of over 3,500 computational cores.
  • The Supercomputer is configured for high availability, including redundant storage and power supplies, as operation is required 24×7.
  • Moreover, the computational peak performance of this HPC cluster will be more than 80 times faster than the currently used system.
  • This HPC solution also consists of a high-performance storage solution based on the NEC LXFS-z parallel file-system appliance, with more than 1 Petabyte of storage capacity and a bandwidth performance of more than 30 Gigabytes per second (GB/s), which are required to meet the production needs of the CHMI. This scalable ZFS-based Lustre solution also provides advanced data integrity features paired with a high density and high reliability design.

The new system is scheduled to be put into operation in early 2018.

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