NEC Corporation announced that the Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (CHMI) in the Czech Republic selected NEC Deutschland GmbH to provide the next generation supercomputer system utilizing NEC’s scale-out LX series compute servers for their weather forecasts.
NEC’s scale-out LX series HPC cluster will enable the Czech Hydrometeorological Service to increase the accuracy of numerical weather forecasting and related applications, namely warning systems. Weather prediction models are increasingly complex, including rainfall, temperature, wind and related variables that have to be calculated as precisely as possible several days in advance. At the same time, regional peculiarities such as orography and terrain physiography need to be considered. In addition, the public must be made aware quickly of predictions of high impact weather events affecting daily life, including environmental risks linked to air pollution. High-performance computing (HPC) is therefore needed for running and completing weather and climate simulation jobs in time.
NEC will deliver the computational power of more than 300 nodes, connected through a high-speed Mellanox EDR InfiniBand network and containing the new Intel® Xeon® E5-2600 v4 product family dual socket compute nodes, with a total of over 3,500 computational cores.
The Supercomputer is configured for high availability, including redundant storage and power supplies, as operation is required 24x7.
Moreover, the computational peak performance of this HPC cluster will be more than 80 times faster than the currently used system.
This HPC solution also consists of a high-performance storage solution based on the NEC LXFS-z parallel file-system appliance, with more than 1 Petabyte of storage capacity and a bandwidth performance of more than 30 Gigabytes per second (GB/s), which are required to meet the production needs of the CHMI. This scalable ZFS-based Lustre solution also provides advanced data integrity features paired with a high density and high reliability design.
The new system is scheduled to be put into operation in early 2018.
“Reliable HPC technology by NEC shall be important both for forecast production and innovation; after Météo-France, CHMI is the second largest contributor to the development of the ALADIN Numerical Weather Prediction System, currently used by 26 countries. Moreover, in this project, we have a specific goal to improve air quality trend forecasts in relation to meteorological conditions and the performance of air quality warning systems,” said Dr. Radmila Brožková, head of the Numerical Weather Prediction Department, CHMI.
“We are very happy that CHMI has selected NEC to deliver an HPC solution for their weather and climate simulations, as NEC has a very special expertise in meteorological applications. For years, we have been successfully collaborating with meteorological institutes, and we look forward to cultivating these partnerships further,” said Andreas Göttlicher, Senior Sales Manager, NEC Deutschland.
NEC has a long-term track record in climate research and weather forecasting and holds a leading position in the supercomputer market.
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