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U.S. buys weather supercomputer with twin backup

08.09.2009
WASHINGTON -- The U.S. has upgraded the supercomputer used to develop weather forecast models, a system so critical to meteorologists that the government has bought a second, identical system as a backup.

This National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) system, which went online in August, is compromised of "Stratus" and its backup, "Cirrus," two separate supercomputers with about 5,000 IBM Power6 chips running AIX operating systems.

Housed at separate locations, the two computers run as "perfectly symmetrical pairs," and if Stratus fails for any reason, Cirrus is designed to take over in a matter of minutes, said Ben Kyger, director of central operations for NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Protection.

Weather forecasters rely on the models produced by this system, and if there was ever an interruption "you're not going to have a forecast -- or you are going to do it without model guidance, which is like going back to the Stone Age," Kyger said.

Stratus and Cirrus were delivered under a $180 million contract that NOAA has with IBM. It replaces a Power5 based system, which also had a backup.

The new system of running at about 70 TFLOPS (trillion calculations per second), which puts it somewhere computer in the world. It has about four times the power of the previous system.