Aug. 11, 2022 — Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology has purchased a high performance computing system from HPE in a three-year deal for US$35 million. The new system, intended to improve the resilience of Australia’s weather forecasting supercomputing capability, will augment a Cray XC50 supercomputer installed at the BOM in 2016, according to a story in the Australian publication ITnews.
The publication reported that the bureau would not disclose system details.
Back in 2016, the Cray XC40 computer replaced an Oracle/Sun HPC system. Then two years ago, the bureau said it planned a hardware enhancement to a 4.0 petaFLOPS Cray SC50 and CS500 system, called “Australis II,” that would “deliver double the computing and storage,” according to ITnews.
A BOM spokesperson told the publication that the “’bureau is expanding its HPC capability’”, and that the new HPC system is intended for a disaster recovery role that to “’provide greater resilience to its digital and data services.’”
Last year, HPE won a contract to continue to support Australis through the idle of 2025.
