Sysadmin....................
Bringing new meaning to the term 'cloud computing', the Met Office is shopping for more CPU cycles.
Dr Chris reveals the supercomputing secrets of the Met Office, and explains how to set up an OpenLDAP server to store user acount details.
The Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, is splurging £97 million on a new supercomputer – a Cray XC40 with go-faster stripes and titanium wheel trims. It almost goes without saying that it will run Linux. According to Cray's website, the "Cray Linux Environment ... includes a Linux-based operating system designed to run large complex applications and scale efficiently to more than 500,000 processor cores. The Linux environment features a kernel that can be configured to match different workloads." You can find the details at http://bit.ly/ CraySpecs.
The Met Office is no stranger to supercomputing; it bought its first machine (a Ferranti Mercury) back in 1959. It could perform 30,000 calculations per second. By way of comparison, a modern PC is maybe 100,000 times as fast. But since then, it’s acquired no less than seven supercomputers from IBM, CDC, Cray and NEC. The new machine, scheduled to become operational next September, will have 480,000 processor cores (Pentium Xeon) and claims a performance of 16 petaflops. I asked my wife what a petaflop was and she said she thought it meant that time in late summer when the flowers start to wilt, but in fact peta means 1015, a number so improbably huge you risk a headache trying to imagine it. I have enough experience of exploiting parallel machines to know that they're unlikely to get anywhere near that figure in terms of useful computation. Still, it's a big number, and 13 times as powerful as the IBM Power 755 the Met Office has now. According to my reading of the list of the world's most powerful computers ( www.top500.org/lists), it's going to come in around number four, at time of writing.
How do you justify the cost of such a huge machine? Well, the Met Office claims it will deliver £2 billion of "socio-economic benefits" for the UK through "enhanced resilience to severe weather and related hazards" by providing more frequent forecasts and will enable strategically important areas, such as airports, to receive forecasts of wind speed, fog and snow to a spatial resolution of 300 metres.