Isambard 2 at UK Met Office to be largest Arm supercomputer in Europe

The  UK Met Office  been awarded £4.1m by EPSRC to create Isambard 2, the largest Arm-based supercomputer in Europe. The powerful new £6.5m facility, to be hosted by the Met Office in Exeter and utilized by the universities of Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and Exeter, will double the size of GW4 Isambard, to 21,504 high performance cores and 336 nodes. “Isambard 2 will incorporate the latest novel technologies from HPE and new partner Fujitsu, including next-generation Arm CPUs in one of the world’s first A64fx machines from Cray.”

Top Weather and Climate Sites run on DDN Storage

“DDN’s unique ability to handle tough application I/O profiles at speed and scale gives weather and climate organizations the infrastructure they need for rapid, high-fidelity modeling,” said Laura Shepard, senior director of product marketing, DDN. “These capabilities are essential to DDN’s growing base of weather and climate organizations, which are at the forefront of scientific research and advancements – from whole climate atmospheric and oceanic modeling to hurricane and severe weather emergency preparedness to the use of revolutionary, new, high-resolution satellite imagery in weather forecasting.”

Cray to Develop ARM-based Isambard Supercomputer for UK Met Office

“This is an exciting time in high performance computing,” said Prof Simon McIntosh-Smith, leader of the project and Professor of High Performance Computing at the University of Bristol. “Scientists have a growing choice of potential computer architectures to choose from, including new 64-bit ARM CPUs, graphics processors, and many-core CPUs from Intel. Choosing the best architecture for an application can be a difficult task, so the new Isambard GW4 Tier 2 HPC service aims to provide access to a wide range of the most promising emerging architectures, all using the same software stack.”

SGI and DDN Power UK Met Office SPICE System for Weather and Climate Research

SGI, Bright Computing, and DDN recently announced that the UK Met Office has selected the three HPC vendors to provide HPC for its new Scientific Processing and Intensive Compute Environment (SPICE) system. SPICE will enable weather and climate researchers to dramatically reduce time required to analyze massive amounts of climate simulation data.

UK Met Office Research Simulations Predict European Winter One Year Ahead

In a paper published today in Nature Geoscience, scientists at the Met Office have demonstrated significant advances in predicting up to one year ahead the phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), which drives European and North American winter variability. The NAO – a large-scale gradient in air pressure measured between low pressure around Iceland and high pressure around the Azores – is the primary driver of winter climate variability for Europe.

Time-lapse Video: Cray Install at UK Met Office

In this video, technicians install a new supercomputer at UK Met Office. The Met Office is the National Weather Service for the UK, providing internationally-renowned weather and climate science and services to support the public, government and businesses.

Long Live the King – The Complicated Business of Upgrading Legacy HPC Systems

“Upgrading legacy HPC systems relies as much on the requirements of the user base as it does on the budget of the institution buying the system. There is a gamut of technology and deployment methods to choose from, and the picture is further complicated by infrastructure such as cooling equipment, storage, networking – all of which must fit into the available space. However, in most cases it is the requirements of the codes and applications being run on the system that ultimately define choice of architecture when upgrading a legacy system. In the most extreme cases, these requirements can restrict the available technology, effectively locking a HPC center into a single technology, or restricting the application of new architectures because of the added complexity associated with code modernization, or porting existing codes to new technology platforms.”

UK Met Office Selects PBS Pro for Workload Management

Today Altair announced that PBS Professional has been selected to manage workloads for the Cray supercomputer being installed by the Met Office, the British government’s national weather service.

UK Met Office to Debug New Cray Systems with Allinea DDT

The UK Met Office is rolling out the Allinea DDT debugger on its newest supercomputers. The debugging tool will be used to help the scientists and developers to develop their widely used forecasting software for the new Cray XC40 systems.

Cray Awarded $128 Million Deal at UK MET Office

Today Cray announced the Company has been awarded a contract to provide the Met Office in the United Kingdom with multiple Cray XC supercomputers and Cray Sonexion storage systems. Consisting of three phases spanning multiple years, the $128 million contract expands Cray’s significant presence in the global weather and climate community, and is the largest supercomputer contract ever for Cray outside of the United States.