In this podcast, the Radio Free HPC team looks at the new ECMWF supercomputer.
This new system will give them roughly 5x more compute power than their current system. The new box is an Atos BullSequana XH2000 fueled by high-end AMD 7742 Epyc processors, which will be the most powerful weather computer in the world. During the conversation we look at the history of ECMWF vendors, discuss the implications on weather forecasts given the power of this new system and the computational difficulties inherent in weather prediction.
Other highlights:
- Henry: The Microsoft 250 million customer records exposure, but it’s a head fake! Henry explains how this is actually an example of how a company should handle an exploit and how this one wasn’t very bad. The verdict? Clickbait. But still stay offline.
- Jessi: Dominos is using GPUs and AI to drive their production and make their deliveries more efficient. Very cool.
- Shahin: Pirelli is making a cyber tire that is sensor enabled and can communicate road conditions to other tires/cars via a 5G network. Shahin then dips into his net again to highlight how a fantastically ambitious man built a radio station in Ohio that went from 50 watts to 500 watts, 50k watts, and eventually to 500k watts. See the video in the link and marvel at the ambition, work, and complexity.
- Henry: From empty net to a catch that will make Shahin’s catch obsolete, Henry makes a last second save with his story about how contact lenses will give us augmented reality and let us see road temperatures better than our tires will.
- Dan: Relates his triumphant but ultimately tragic drone lessons. Henry and Dan relate how they’ve both suffered grievous injuries at the hands of a .49 Cox gas engine.
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Regarding ECMWF, they are not moving the headquarters. That remains in England, along with most all of the technical staff. They are moving to a new data centre, this really didn’t have anything to do with Brexit. Instead, this was part of an expected evaluation/competition about where the next generation data centre should be located. There were three finalists (including Iceland) and the winner is Bologna, Italy. There is an old cigarette factory next to the train station, with plenty of available electrical power. It’s being converted into a data centre.