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Met Office forecasters set for 'billion pound' supercomputer
- lambertsimnel 7y agoA previous Met Office supercomputer purchase was discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519820 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519820
- jjgreen 7y agoI guess this is not unrelated to the ECMWF departing Reading for Bologna https://www.ecmwf.int/en/learning/workshops/ecmwf-bologna-2020-panel-discussion https://www.ecmwf.int/en/learning/workshops/ecmwf-bologna-20...
- dtf 7y agoInteresting they’re talking about colocating it in EEA countries. I see the rationale for Iceland and Norway, but why specify them as EEA? Is there a post-Brexit strategic angle to this? (considering the large sum of public money involved)
- ivanbakel 7y agoThey are not specified as EEA countries. The EEA is specified as the constraint for the supercomputer's location - Iceland and Norway are given as two possibilities, but after that constraint. How would you phrase that part of the article if indeed any EEA country could be the location of the new computer, and you wanted to include Iceland and Norway as two candidate countries?
- tgflynn 7y agoIf the goal of the remote location is access to stable renewable energy wouldn't a South European location make more sense ?
- adamcharnock 7y agoI haven’t researched this, but I imagine the reasoning goes something like this: Iceland has geothermal, and Norway has hydro. Both will need less storage than solar (perhaps none?). Other more political thoughts are: Southern Europe looks like Portugal, Spain, Italy, and Greece. Perhaps Iceland and Norway seem more politically stable? And maybe this will mend some fences with Iceland after the UK seized it’s banks assets under the terrorism act (although that’s going back a little bit now). Edit: Typo
- justincormack 7y agoSpain, and much of southern Europe, has good solar, but not that much renewable at night I think. The setup for wind is better in slightly more northern europe. Iceland has geothermal that never fails, and Norway has hydro.
- renaudg 7y agoThe article says "easy sources of clean energy" : that doesn't actually fully equate to "renewable energy". Assuming that "clean" really means "low carbon", then only majority nuclear/hydro/geothermal electricity grids can currently achieve that. Wind/solar on the other hand are intermittent, and always need to be complemented with "dispatchable" energy sources to handle the base load. That can either be hydro/geothermal if you were blessed with the right geography (like Iceland or Sweden), nuclear if you weren't but are pragmatic about it (like France), or coal/gas if you got scared of nuclear but still have a large country to power (like Germany). I'm stressing the latter because, even as Germany is rightfully praised as a renewables champion that invested billions to be 70% wind/solar powered on a very good day, that's all in vain when it comes to climate change : coal/gas is so bad that their average carbon intensity of electricity production is still mediocre (see http://electricitymap.org/ http://electricitymap.org/) So, renewables doesn't always mean low carbon. If that's the primary concern for the location, France is probably their best bet (nearly as low carbon intensity as Iceland, and much closer to the UK)
- mkj 7y agoLatency would be too high outside of Europe
- jetrink 7y agoOne interesting fact that I learned from Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise, is that weather forecasting is a four-dimensional problem (space + time), so to produce a forecast that is twice as detailed requires approximately 16x the computing resources. Historically, the resolution of weather forecasts has doubled roughly every eight years, in line with with Moore's Law.
- pedrocr 7y agoIs there a similar rule of thumb for how accuracy tracks with the added resolution?
- cryptoz 7y agoDo you mean added resolution of input data, or improved resolution at which the models are run? Input data is frankly very limited - IMO we are barely measuring the atmosphere. Model runs are higher resolutions are only good if there is sufficient input data to seed the models. It's my lifelong passion to increase the usable input data (live atmosphere measurements) that models can assimilate. My latest attempt is to use the barometers in phones to create billions of new 'virtual weather stations'. My US-only Android app (iOS and international coming soon) is https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearweather.android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe... You can see an animation of the data recorded in the Orlando, FL area when Dorian was churning off the coast: https://www.allclearweather.com/hurricane-dorian https://www.allclearweather.com/hurricane-dorian The data requires significant QA and bias correction to use, but it is possible (see Cliff Mass research papers) and the trends in the data are already clear and usable, regardless of actual pressure value recorded. Let's add a source code link for Android background/foreground sensor access that I wrote to further these goals: https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary https://github.com/JacobSheehy/AllClearSensorLibrary
- monocasa 7y agoI heard that it's twelve dimensional. Used to work with a guy who's PHD thesis was on the diffeq of weather predictions.
- mqus 7y agoThere are also some voices that attribute bad local weather forecasts to closed weatherstations and errorprone digital replacements to manual measurements... But hey, new supercomputers are cool!
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- TrolTure 7y agoFrom an outside perspective I have to wonder if a billion pound investment in forecasting/science would not deliver better long term ROI.
- simonh 7y agoWould it do so in just a few years though? The pragmatic approach is to invest in both tools and research.
- clickok 7y agoIt depends– if you're trying to run a specific algorithm on your new supercomputer, then you'd almost certainly be better off paying for researchers to optimize or improve on that algorithm. If that's the situation (which it is for e.g. weather forecasting or computational fluid dynamics), then a billion pound supercomputer is likely to be more of a boondoggle than a sharp-eyed investment. A good implementation on a desktop can beat a bad one running on a supercomputer. But if it's a time-sharing system, then it might not matter as much. The supercomputer at my university tends to run a lot of one-off jobs like an experiment repeated thousands of times with different parameters. On a desktop that might take weeks, but if run in parallel it's like a couple hours. Tightly optimized code might bring that down to an hour on the cluster (or a mere week on my home PC) but I wouldn't bother because making the code more efficient might itself take a week or more. So the fastest way to get the results I need would be to just run it on the supercomputer.
- tgflynn 7y agoI'm surprised to see a supercomputer cross the 1 billion pound/euro/dollar mark. Previous recent supercomputers seem to have cost in the low nine figures. I realize the price tag includes a decade of operation but that still seems like quite a leap.
- bitminer 7y agoThe "cost of ownership" is often approximately 33%/33%/33% for capital cost (annually), support (annually) and users& operations. Of course being government they probably don't account for the costs on an accrual basis. Two machines, 5 years apart, and 66% non-hardware for ten years is, what, 250 or 300 millions for the pair of them?
- tgflynn 7y agoI'm not sure what exactly they're including in the operating costs. If they include salaries for researchers, meteorologists, programmers, etc. I could definitely see it hit a billion over 10 years. But then it would seem a bit misleading to call it a "billion pound" supercomputer.
- vosper 7y agoThe Omega Tau podcast did an interesting episode about weather modeling at the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasts https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ecmwf/ https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-e...
- martinpw 7y agoSeems there is not much information yet on the actual hardware. Quick search found this: https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/17/hpes-cray-tapped-build-massive-1-6b-weather-supercomputer-uk/ https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/17/hpes-cray-tapped-build-m... Eventually reaching 145 PFlops The Met Office didn’t share further hardware details other than the fact that the supercomputer will incorporate graphics processing cards.
- mrosett 7y agoAh - I momentarily forgot that the Met Office is in a country where “pound” is a measurement of money, not weight. This made me curious. Apparently supercomputers can weigh 1 million pounds [0]. So a billion pound supercomputer in the US would be ~1000x more powerful than a billion pound supercomputer in the UK and cost a few percent of GDP to build.
- myhf 7y agoIn some countries, one "billion" means 1,000,000,000,000 instead of 1,000,000,000, so there it would be exactly 1000x more powerful than in the UK.