By: TOP500 Team

In the course of tracking commercial and research supercomputers here at The Platform, it has become apparent that this is the year for massive refreshes and updates to existing weather prediction systems.

In the last six months alone, there have been a number of notable new large-scale purchases in the segment and while we have described some of the market here, the consensus at the systems level is that the codes that back the forecasts we depend on tend to churn best with as many CPU cores as can be thrown a weather supercomputer’s way. And if current trends are indicative, those cores are most often packed into cabinets from supercomputer maker, Cray.

Not varying from at least part of that tradition, today marks yet another win for Cray in the weather modeling and prediction space, but this time with an interesting twist. As we have described in other pieces describing the architectural choices for major weather centers, which tends to follow the line of twin systems (one for production, one for failover and ongoing research) and straight CPUs for the scalable, ancient Fortran-based codes, this new machine will be the first to run numerical prediction models with a GPU boost.

Read the full article on The Platform.