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| Microsoft is building the world's most powerful weather supercomputer |
The United Kingdom announced today that it will expand its project to build the world's most powerful climate and weather supercomputer with the help of Microsoft to take UK weather fanatics to the next level.
The National Weather Service has signed a multi-million pound contract with the technology company on the project, which has previously been earmarked for £ 1.2 billion (US $ 1.6 billion) in government funding.
While the UK is already proud of its current weather supercomputer, which can perform 16,000 trillion calculations per second, the new device will be twice as powerful.
By accessing more detailed climate models, the UK hopes to protect its cities and transport infrastructure from extreme weather events in the future.
The system, located in the south of Great Britain, is 100% renewable and is expected to save 7,415 tons of CO2 in its first year of operation.
When running next summer, the supercomputer will also provide detailed simulation information about local weather forecasts to prepare emergency services for torrential rains and floods.
The new system could bring good news to rural communities hit by last year's storm and prompt the government to advocate a more sustainable wastewater treatment system.
According to scientists at Climate Alliance, England has experienced severe flooding nearly every year since 2007, and the Cray XC40 supercomputer of the Bureau of Meteorology is relying in part on publicly available data to provide weather forecasts for remote areas of the UK.
The United Kingdom drew on its expertise in cloud and quantum computing and decided to seek help from Microsoft.
The company has invested $ 1 billion in an Azure hosted supercomputer developed for the Open AI startup to test large AI models.
Microsoft said: The open artificial intelligence devices with 285,000 processor cores and 10,000 GPUs are compatible with the five best systems in the world, and the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer currently belongs to the Japanese computer Fugaku.