Anthony Doesburg writes in the New Zealand Herald about NIWA’s new supercomputer, which the organisation hopes will allow it to more accurately forecast weather conditions, why it’s called ‘Fitzroy’, and what it is capable of doing.
Improved forecast accuracy could help give people better warning about hazards such as floods (which would decrease damage costs to the country).
An excerpt: (read in full here)
“It is certainly no ordinary computer.
“It has the equivalent processing power and data storage capacity of several thousand laptops and can carry out 34 trillion calculations a second. It will run Niwa’s weather and wave prediction software about 100 times faster than the machine it replaces.
“On FitzRoy, models that used to take 80 minutes to complete on 40 per cent of the old supercomputer take eight minutes using about 4 per cent of its capacity.”
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