NWS triples computing power to generate more accurate forecasts

[Steve Miller]

Every year, the nation’s meteorologists convene to discuss the weather and the status of weather science at the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society. The meeting is also a time for big announcements, and in New Orleans this week the National Weather Service was able to announce to the meteorological community that it had successfully completed a long-awaited computing upgrade.

Read more: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...ng-power-to-generate-more-accurate-forecasts/

 

[Jeff Duda]

I'm not sure where the article gets the "triple" figure from. They must be computing it in some other way than the ratio of FLOPS. I get a value of about 7.5x.

 

[Michael Towers]

I'm not sure where the article gets the "triple" figure from. They must be computing it in some other way than the ratio of FLOPS. I get a value of about 7.5x.

I believe the “triple” figure comes from an increase of 3.72 times, at least that’s how I calculate it. The statement “a new total of 5.78 petaflops of operational computing capacity” is misleading, it may be the combined capacity but that doesn’t equate to operational capacity as each works independently with one being a backup. Each has a processing power of 2.89 petaflops so that’s the max processing power. The previous max processing power was 776 teraflops thus an increase of about 3.72 times which is what I believe is the basis of “In other words, it triples the computing power available”. If so the new computers actually almost quadruple the power.

 

[James Hilger]

It's the accurate part that I'm waiting for the results on. Hope so.