3 percent that of the lower 48 states. South Korea’s new Cray computers gave it a capacity of 6.2 petaflops, for a country only 1.2 percent the size of the continental U.S., Mass wrote.
“My back-of-the envelope-calculation is that the National Weather Service needs a minimum of 20-30 petaflops of computer power to provide the American people with state-of-the science weather prediction that would improve the life of everyone in important ways,” Mass wrote.
It remains to be seen whether the new machines will move the needle on U.S. forecasting accuracy, including higher-resolution forecasts of severe storms and other damaging events. Mass was optimistic.
“Properly used, this new computer power can revolutionize and greatly improve the skill of U.S. numerical weather prediction [NWP], with huge positive impacts for the country,” Mass wrote when the deal was announced. Other hurdles remain, he continued, “But the excuse of lack of computer power is gone and a renaissance in U.S. NWP is possible.”
For Cray, the deal solidifies its position in weather forecasting. Bolding said the company supplies supercomputers that handle half of all weather forecasts globally, including nearly all of the top-tier national weather forecasting centers.
“We’re kind of the de facto standard, and that’s because we make these systems that are right at the intersection of big data and supercomputing, and there are fewer competitors that are really focused on that convergence of big data and supercomputing today,” he said.
IBM (NYSE: [[ticker:IBM]]) is one of them. That’s why there’s a strange competitive footnote to Cray’s deal with NOAA.
Cray is actually supplying the supercomputers as a subcontractor to IBM, which holds a long-term contract with NOAA.
Mass suggested that NOAA didn’t want to purchase the new supercomputers from IBM, which in 2014 sold a piece of its supercomputing business for $2.3 billion to Lenovo Group, the Chinese hardware maker. Revelations last November that Chinese hackers had breached NOAA satellite systems ratcheted up pressure from some lawmakers concerned about cyber-security.
At the time, NOAA said the sale to Lenovo of IBM’s x86 server business, cleared by the Committee on Foreign Investment, would have no impact on its “ability to provide timely and accurate forecasts to maintain public safety,” according to a statement to the news site NextGov.
Bolding wouldn’t comment on the intrigue, noting that Cray has had contracts with NOAA for many years.
“NOAA has its own mechanisms it has to follow for doing contracting,” he said. “And they certainly wanted a Cray system, because their models actually work very well on Cray systems.”
At the same time last fall, Mass was penning his searing criticisms of the administration for its lack of action to improve weather forecasting computer power. He lent his support to a We the People petition launched by someone in Bellevue, WA, which garnered upwards of 660 signatures, urging the administration to order a supercomputer. Did this impact the agency’s decision to finally go ahead and spend the money it had been allocated for an upgrade?
“I can’t really say if there’s a correlation there,” Bolding said. “Certainly in time there was.” But of course major government contracts take a long time to advance, so it might have been a coincidence.
Coincidence or not, Cray supercomputers from Seattle (and Chippewa Falls) will be powering what should be much improved U.S. weather forecasts later this year.
