To improve the resilience of Australia’s weather forecasting supercomputer, the Bureau of Meteorology has purchased a DR HPC system from HPE.
An existing Cray XC50 supercomputer will be supplemented with an HPE DR HPC system under a three-year, $49.3 million contract.
In 2020, the Bureau of Meteorology’s former data center, the central computing facility (CCF), was fully decommissioned.
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The CCF, which was relocated to the bureau’s current Melbourne office in 2004, was a 1520-square-meter ‘computer room’ first commissioned in 1974.
In June 2016, BOM began using a Cray XC40 supercomputer in order to improve its weather modelling compared to a former Oracle/Sun-based HPC system. ‘
BOM deputy director of information systems and services Dr Lesley Seebeck said in 2016 the successful commissioning of the supercomputer demonstrates BOM’s capacity to deliver large-scale IT initiatives
The supercomputer, named ‘Australis,’ was designed to offer 16 times the performance of the existing HPC when it was commissioned with a peak performance of 1.6 petaflops.
HPE landed the deal to continue supporting Australis until June 2025, a year after the new contract was signed.
