
Met Office forecasters set for 'billion pound' supercomputer - aluket
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-51504002
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jjgreen
I guess this is not unrelated to the ECMWF departing Reading for Bologna
[https://www.ecmwf.int/en/learning/workshops/ecmwf-
bologna-20...](https://www.ecmwf.int/en/learning/workshops/ecmwf-
bologna-2020-panel-discussion)

~~~
timthorn
This is unrelated. The Met Office is going out for a new platform to run daily
forecasts rather than climate models, as the current machine reaches end of
life in 2022.

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jjgreen
I stand corrected

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jetrink
One 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.

~~~
monocasa
I heard that it's twelve dimensional. Used to work with a guy who's PHD thesis
was on the diffeq of weather predictions.

~~~
brandmeyer
The time-spatial discretization is 4D. There are many different state
variables within each grid cell.

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craftinator
Vorticity patterns are often treated as an additional set of 3 dimensions,
because they require continuous differentiation. Modern weather forecasting
software is a beast.

~~~
brandmeyer
I've done some reading through the literature on the dynamical cores of
weather models. It isn't really true that vorticity is modeled as an
additional set of dimensions.

Vorticity and divergence are an alternative description of the fluid velocity.
They are the curl and div of the fluid velocity, respectively.

Just as the fluid velocity may be discretized in 3 spatial and one time
dimension, the fluid's vorticity and divergence may be discretized in three
spatial and one time dimension.

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mrosett
Ah - 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.

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myhf
In 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.

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ubercow13
Wasn't that originally a British thing? But we adopted the American billion
ages ago. Are there other countries where it's still used?

~~~
belinder
germany, holland, belgium, maybe more

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martinpw
Seems there is not much information yet on the actual hardware. Quick search
found this:

[https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/17/hpes-cray-tapped-
build-m...](https://siliconangle.com/2020/02/17/hpes-cray-tapped-build-
massive-1-6b-weather-supercomputer-uk/)

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.

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mqus
There 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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vosper
The 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-e...](https://omegataupodcast.net/326-weather-forecasting-at-the-ecmwf/)

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dtf
Interesting 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)

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tgflynn
If the goal of the remote location is access to stable renewable energy
wouldn't a South European location make more sense ?

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renaudg
The 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)

~~~
tgflynn
> Wind/solar on the other hand are intermittent, and always need to be
> complemented with "dispatchable" energy sources to handle the base load.

I've seen people claim here that battery storage already represents a good
solution to that problem. Elon Musk's battery storage project in Australia
seems to be successful and powering a supercomputer would probably require a
much smaller installation.

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tgflynn
I'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
The "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
I'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.

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lambertsimnel
A previous Met Office supercomputer purchase was discussed here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519820](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8519820)

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TrolTure
From an outside perspective I have to wonder if a billion pound investment in
forecasting/science would not deliver better long term ROI.

~~~
clickok
It 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.

