UK Met Office announces new £97m supercomputer

The supercomputer will be built in Exeter and will become operational in September 2015, reaching its full capacity in 2017, when the processing power will be 16 petaflops.

The facility will work 13 times faster than the current system, enabling detailed, UK-wide forecast models with a resolution of 1.5km to be run every single hour, rather than every three. Enabling forecast updates every hour and the ability to provide very high detail weather information for precise geographical areas, the world-leading High Performance Computer (HPC) will help the UK to predict disruptive weather events such as flooding, strong winds, fog and heavy snowfall more effectively.

The supercomputer, which will be based at the Met Office and Exeter Science Park, will weigh 140 tonnes, the equivalent of 11 double decker buses.