3 ms·

Even the Met Office's press release just says it weights as much as 11 double decker buses rather than any actual technical details. I presume they didnt buy it

Even the Met Office's press release just says it weights as much as 11 double decker buses rather than any actual technical details. I presume they didnt buy it by weight, why dumb everything down.

justincormack 12y ago
Ah Cray has some actual details[1]. [1] http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1982080 http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsA...
quarterto 12y ago
100 tons, according to the radio this morning.
Graham24 12y ago
The double decker bus is a standard unit of measurement for height and weight, for large areas it's Wales.
- petepete 12y ago
  Medium areas are well-covered by football pitches.
  - scottmcf 12y ago
    Olympic sized swimming pools give a little more granularity.
gjm11 12y ago
To be fair, that press release does give - quantitative information about the new system's power relative to its predecessor ("13 times more powerful"; I assume they mean something like "13x faster on typical workloads") - quantitative information about its speed in absolute terms ("more than 16,000 trillion calculations per second") - quantitative information about what it will let them do that they couldn't before ("forecast updates every hour", "very high resolution (300m) models", and few particular projects they intend to use it for) - a little more tech-spec information, albeit stupidly presented ("120,000 times more memory than a top-end smartphone", which I presume means either 120TB or 240TB) - how much they're spending - how long they expect it to take to get it set up and working and they do give the weight in tonnes as well as in double-decker buses. I don't really see that there's much of a problem here.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- tobylane 12y ago
  To compare to the top supercomputers, Cray Titan cost around $160m at the end of 2013 and has 17 petaflops. Met Office also use Cray, so it might be that they ordered Titan with a little less flops, a lot less memory.

Even the Met Office's press release just says it weights as much as 11 double decker buses rather than any actual technical details. I presume they didnt buy it by weight, why dumb everything down.

justincormack 12y ago

Ah Cray has some actual details[1]. [1] http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsArticle&ID=1982080 http://investors.cray.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=98390&p=irol-newsA...

quarterto 12y ago

100 tons, according to the radio this morning.

Graham24 12y ago

The double decker bus is a standard unit of measurement for height and weight, for large areas it's Wales.

petepete 12y ago
Medium areas are well-covered by football pitches.
- scottmcf 12y ago
  Olympic sized swimming pools give a little more granularity.

gjm11 12y ago

To be fair, that press release does give - quantitative information about the new system's power relative to its predecessor ("13 times more powerful"; I assume they mean something like "13x faster on typical workloads") - quantitative information about its speed in absolute terms ("more than 16,000 trillion calculations per second") - quantitative information about what it will let them do that they couldn't before ("forecast updates every hour", "very high resolution (300m) models", and few particular projects they intend to use it for) - a little more tech-spec information, albeit stupidly presented ("120,000 times more memory than a top-end smartphone", which I presume means either 120TB or 240TB) - how much they're spending - how long they expect it to take to get it set up and working and they do give the weight in tonnes as well as in double-decker buses. I don't really see that there's much of a problem here.

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
tobylane 12y ago
To compare to the top supercomputers, Cray Titan cost around $160m at the end of 2013 and has 17 petaflops. Met Office also use Cray, so it might be that they ordered Titan with a little less flops, a lot less memory.