Supercomputer at OMSZ

The National Meteorological Service has put into operation a high-performance supercomputer to increase the accuracy and reliability of the forecast.

In order to clarify short-term weather forecasts, the National Meteorological Service (OMSZ) plans to run more detailed and complex models on the high-performance SGI Altix supercomputer, which can proudly bear the label "Hungary's most powerful computer".

In the field of numerical weather forecasting, OMSZ has been researching and modeling climate change for decades, from ultra-short-term (a few hours) forecasts. In 2005, OMSZ staff concluded that their existing computing capacities were no longer able to meet the growing demands and expectations posed by weather forecasts.

Rapid analysis of data collected for short-term weather forecasts and generation of forecasts from them requires extreme computational power and memory. OMSZ experts examined several options and platforms, and the most convincing performance was provided by the Silicon Graphics Altix servers. In addition, the new Altix system, with its nearly four-fold expandability, provides sufficient reserves to meet OMSZ's further, growing needs. The price / performance ratio, which was also measured by running two different weather forecast models, played a key role in the selection: one was the ALADIN model, which was primarily a joint development of a consortium of European countries (including Hungary), and the other was the MM5, an American model.

Based on the results, an SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer with 144 Intel Itanium 2 processors, 288 GB of memory and Novell SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 9 was selected. Silicon Graphics ’shared memory (SMP) platform performed so well in test programs that the 144-processor Altix also outperformed its competitors’ systems of around 200 processors, which run on Power5 and Opteron.

The new machine has a computing capacity of nearly 900 GFlop / s (900 billion floating-point computing operations per second), compared to approx. three times more performance than the capacity of Hungary's most powerful computer to date. The SGI Altix server significantly reduces the runtime of current applications by being able to handle extreme data sets in a single, system-wide global memory area.

With the new system, it only takes a few minutes to calculate the forecast (for current model variants), as opposed to nearly one hour on the current system (more specifically, the ALADIN model’s 48-hour forecast execution time is reduced from 1 hour to about 10 minutes). Such a surge in computing power will have an impact on the reliability and accuracy of forecasts.

OMSZ plans to put the new system into operation in the first half of 2006.