The Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) has announced an agreement with Cray to acquire a next generation HPC facility for meteorological computations, weather forecasting, climate modelling, etc. The new supercomputer will have about ten times the computing power of the existing facility.
DMI usually upgrades supercomputing resources in a 5-7 year cycle in order to see the best balance of continuous increase in calculation power, energy efficiency and cost. DMI HPC facilities have traditionally been located and operated at the DMI offices in Copenhagen, however, the next generation facility will be located in Iceland. DMI has entered into a partnership with the Icelandic Met Office, Veðurstofa Íslands. The new machine will be housed at the Veðurstofa Íslands facility in Reykjavik, and the two organisations will partner for operations of the new supercomputer.
The DMI HPC facility being located in Iceland allows the machine to be powered from 100% CO2 neutral geothermic and hydroelectric power sources. Likewise, the cooling requirements for the facility are less power consuming due to the cold local climate. Combined with lower electrical power cost in Iceland, the life-time power cost for the HPC facility is much reduced.
Locating the machine in Iceland will require additional data transport between DMI in Copenhagen and the Veðurstofa Íslands in Reykjavik. Estimated traffic is within the range of 1Gbps, with peaks up to 10 Gbps. The connectivity supporting this will be supplied by Danish NREN DeIC, Icelandic NREN RHnet, and by NORDUnet. The new supercomputer will be installed during autumn 2015 and will, if everything goes as planned, be in production from the beginning of 2016.
Read the announcement from DMI here.
