HPE continued its strong showing in the HPC weather sector with the announcement it has built a 401.4 teraFLOPS supercomputer for the Meteorological Service Singapore (MSS) to advance forecasting and tropical climate research for Singapore and the broader Southeast Asia region.
The system delivers nearly twice the performance and advanced capabilities across compute, storage, software and networking of its previous system, according to HPE, using these technologies:
• 196 3rd Gen AMD EPYC processors to target modeling and simulation of weather and climate data
• HPE Slingshot, the world’s only high performance Ethernet fabric designed to power dataintensive and AI solutions, delivers an additional boost in speed while enabling congestion control for larger data-intensive and AI workloads
• Cray ClusterStor E1000 storage parallel system from HPE and HPE Data Management Framework to address storage demands of data growth and complexity from an increase of workloads in modeling, simulation and AI
• HPE Cray Operating System and HPE Cray Programming Environment to allow users to access an integrated software suite to optimize modeling, simulations and AI workloads
Additionally, as with MSS’ previous Cray-based supercomputer, the new system will use Altair PBS Professional, one of the industry’s leading job scheduling and workload manager solutions to scale various modeling, simulation and AI workloads. The supercomputer is hosted at the CCRS’s Data Centre.
The company said the enhanced supercomputing power will help increase forecast skills through improved numerical model configurations and advanced data assimilation of ground-and space-based weather observations in MSS’ numerical weather prediction system called ‘SINGV’. It was developed by MSS’ Centre for
Climate Research Singapore (CCRS) through collaborations with UK Met Office and partners, and configured specifically for weather forecasts and climate applications in Singapore and the nearby region.
Additionally, the supercomputer will enable the use of modern forecast postprocessing algorithms, using machine learning techniques, to improve the quality of forecasts. The computational power will also allow the further development of the following high-resolution models to deliver improved weather and climate products:
• Sub-kilometer scale urban modelling (uSINGV), which is being developed to represent the urban environment more appropriately in weather and climate applications
• Coupled ocean-atmosphere-land-wave modelling system (cSINGV) to capture and improve the understanding of the strong feedbacks between the atmosphere, land and ocean, which impact weather and climate over the Southeast Asia region
“Singapore continues to drive its national initiatives with supercomputing projects that significantly contribute to science, accelerate innovation and improve a range of areas for the greater good of its citizens,” said Trish Damkroger, chief product officer and senior vice president, HPC, AI, & Labs at HPE.
“We are honored to play a role in the nation’s digital agenda and be selected by the Meteorological Service Singapore to build them a powerful system with advanced, end-to-end supercomputing technologies that will fuel Singapore’s weather intelligence and speed up predictions of extreme climate events.”
The MSS, which is part of Singapore’s National Environment Agency (NEA), is dedicated to providing the nation with timely weather forecasts, insights into Singapore’s tropical climate, and better understanding of event patterns in monsoons, heatwaves and air pollution. To advance MSS’ mission, the new system, which will be built using the HPE Cray supercomputer to deliver powerful, endto-end performance and capabilities, will improve modeling and simulation of complex weather data to provide more accurate, real-time weather forecasts and warnings to citizens.
“At CCRS, our scientists and software engineers are committed to developing advanced modelling systems and examining complex data to provide timely weather forecasts for our nation, which due to the island’s unique geological positioning, often experiences various of weather processes on a daily basis,” said Prof. Dale Barker, Director (CCRS). “After collaborating with Hewlett Packard Enterprise to design the new supercomputer, our research center will gain a faster system with next-generation
technologies to advance modeling and simulation tools, while introducing new capabilities to test and apply future types of applications for deeper research methodologies.”
