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I think the comments nearby about high communications bandwidth required by dense systems of equations are true -- basically they distinguish a tuned, integrate
by mturmon 11y ago
I think the comments nearby about high communications bandwidth required by dense systems of equations are true -- basically they distinguish a tuned, integrated system sold by a vendor like Cray from a row of racks with commodity systems.
The point I wanted to add is that ECMWF, generally acknowledged to be the leader in NWP, also uses a pair of large Cray supercomputers (http://www.ecmwf.int/en/computing/our-facilities/supercomputer http://www.ecmwf.int/en/computing/our-facilities/supercomput...).
Note that the Cray XC30 uses Xeon processors and a custom interconnect. The old ECMWF system used IBM Power chips.
- mrow84 11y agoYes, it is the interconnects that are important. The UK Met Office has also recently upgraded to a Cray XC40 [0], and there are other XC30 systems in the UK NSS [1] and the US NERSC [2], both of which are used for weather/climate models, amongst other things. [0] http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2014/new-hpc http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/news/releases/archive/2014/new-h... [1] http://www.archer.ac.uk/about-archer/ http://www.archer.ac.uk/about-archer/ [2] http://www.nersc.gov/systems/edison-cray-xc30/ http://www.nersc.gov/systems/edison-cray-xc30/