IBM predicts the weather
9 May 2008 | 08:07 BST
Big Blue skies
IBM HAS SWITCHED ON a new supercomputer which will use all of its power to work out if it will be nice weather.
Bluefire, which will sit at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, will help Michael Fish-type boffins create more precise models.
Bluefire runs 4,046 IBM Power 7 microprocessors with a clock speed of 4.7 gigahertz. It also includes 12 terabytes of memory and 150 terabytes of disk storage. It can do 76 trillion floating point operations per second.
As you would expect it is pretty fast. According to Daily Camera one second of computer time would be the same as giving everyone in the world a calculator and they worked on a mathematical computation for every second of nine days. This is, of course, if they didn’t stop to spell BIG BOOBS upside down.
Top weather boffin Lawrence Buja, said that the computer would allow them to build much more detail into their predictions. He said it was like switching from a regular television to a high-definition television. µ
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