UK to build World’s most powerful climate-change forecasting supercomputer

Met Office and Microsoft are to build a weather forecasting supercomputer in the UK. The UK Government is to invest 1.2 billion Pound Sterling in the project.

About the Supercomputer

• The supercomputer is expected to be one of the top twenty-five supercomputers in the world.
• It will help in better understanding of Climate Change.
• The supercomputer will provide the following:
  • It will provide detailed weather models
  • It will help to improve localised forecasts
  • It will run more potential weather scenarios
  • It will help predict severe weather
• The Supercomputer is to run completely on renewable energy. This will help to save 7,415 tonnes of Carbon Dioxide in one year. Supercomputers release huge amounts of heat and thus a strong cooling system is required for their operation. Thus, energy required to maintain supercomputers is high.
• It will have more than 1.5 million processor cores
• The supercomputer will be able to do 60 quadrillion calculations per second, which is 60,000,000,000,000,000.

Benefits

• The Supercomputer will be used to create detailed city scale simulations to provide localised climate reports.
• It will help the aviation industry with an accurate forecast of temperature and wind information. This in turn will help to improve the fuel efficiency.
• It will help UK to achieve its net Zero target by 2050.

About Supercomputers

• Since 2017 the top 500 supercomputers of the world are running on Linux-based Operating System.
• The performance of supercomputers is now measured in Floating Point operations per second called FLOPS. Earlier they were measured in Million Instructions per Second.
• Lenovo became the largest provider of Top 500 supercomputers. It has provided 117 units of the top 500 supercomputers in the world.

Month: Current Affairs - April, 2021