National Weather Service Announces a Tenfold Boost in Supercomputer Power By Eric Holthaus
On Monday the National Weather Service announced a huge boost in its ability to forecast the weather, thanks to a massive new supercomputer. Once completed, the system could be the ninth-most powerful supercomputer in the world, according to TOP500.org, a group that ranks the world's fastest computers. It's a huge win for meteorologists-nearly every entity that produces weather forecasts in the United States, from the Weather Channel to your local TV station, relies on the National Weather Service as an informational backbone. The benefits will be almost immediate. Starting in January, the agency will launch a major interim upgrade to its flagship weather forecasting model, the Global Forecast System, which will more than double its resolution of short-term forecasts. The new system should be fully operational by October and will eventually boast a 5 petaflop capacity, nearly double what close observers of the National Weather Service had anticipated. One petaflop is equivalent to a million billion floating point calculations per second. ... http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/01/05/national_weather_service_announces_a_ten_fold_boost_in_supercomputer_power.html _______________________________________________ Medianews mailing list [email protected] http://etskywarn.net/mailman/listinfo/medianews_etskywarn.net
