UK national weather service has new mainframes that can perform 23,000 trillion calculations a second

Met Office, the UK’s national weather service, has a new IT solution, thanks to a partnership between the service, IBM and Computacenter. It will allow the Met Office to process greater volumes of weather data faster.

Currently, the service collects and safeguards around 200 million weather observations every day. The new environment includes two new mainframes with 44 cores, and 200 terabytes of attached storage.

This solution will allow the Met Office to perform more than 23,000 trillion calculations per second. The platform is based on two IBM z13 LinuxOne mainframes and IBM hybrid storage systems.

"Every day, our weather and climate forecasts help people make better decisions," says Richard Bevan, head of IT Infrastructure and Operations at the Met Office. "We help organizations save lives, reduce costs, meet schedules and encourage growth. We want to transform weather intelligence into a tool that drives greater business performance in today’s digital world and the mainframe is at the heart of that."

The Met Office says it is planning on migrating a "number of additional applications," open source databases and workloads to the new system. Those also include the file transfer hubs, currently being hosted on disparate server clusters.

Brian Say, Enterprise Solution Specialist at Computacenter, concludes: "By helping the Met Office bring together various solutions, we were able to create a client experience that will benefit millions of individuals and organizations across the UK”. For example, better forecasting for adverse weather conditions could enable airport controllers to plan for disruption and allow flight path optimization to reduce fuel consumption."

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