, Korea, Germany and Australia use the same computer, while Japan relies on the Fujitsu PrimeHPC FX100 and China on IBM’s Flex System P46.
The XC40 has allowed the UK to become “pretty good” at weather forecasting, says Kirkman. “There’s a real community of science that sits around this." Each decade, the Met can predict an entire day further into the future. While the new computer may not speed up forecasts, it will improve their accuracy.In the meantime a "human brain" supercomputer with 1 million processors has been switched on by British scientists for the first time, as a result of its creators at Manchester University's hope that it will be able to "unlock some of the secrets of how the human brain works".
"I think we can expect the quality of forecasting to improve a lot," says Mark Parsons, director of Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre at the University of Edinburgh. Weather is modelled by cutting the globe up into little blocks,” he explains. At one point the block size was 50 miles and whenever they buy a new computer they can reduce the size of the block, making predictions much more accurate.”
Currently, a model of the Earth is split up into squares that are 10km across. In the UK, forecasts by the Met are more accurate with squares at 1,500m across.Eventually, the new supercomputer could work at a resolution of just 100 million across, allowing forecasters to predict, for instance, if a particular road is at risk of flooding. Prof Mark Wilkinson at the University of Leicester says that the upgrade to the Met Office is “absolutely essential”.
“You can’t make the types of models that they’re developing without a supercomputer. You gather lots of data from satellites and ground stations but the data themselves don’t tell you what’s going to happen, you need a computer capable of modelling long into the future.” he says.
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Added by Michael Grove at 14:23 on February 18, 2020