The South Korean Air Force's 73rd Weather Group has purchased and begun operations with a high-performance computing (HPC) solution consisting of an SGI Altix ICE 8400 system to accelerate production and distribution of long-term weather forecasts to the country's defence forces.
The Altix ICE 8400 system has more than 1,700 processor cores built with Intel Xeon processors 5600 series, and 800 TB of SGI InfiniteStorage and Spectra Logic tape storage. It will be used for numerical weather forecasting and is projected to achieve twice the performance of the previous solution. The weather forecasting results obtained from this new system will be shared with other meteorological administrations to provide more accurate data for the Korean peninsula.
‘Having previously used a government supercomputing facility, we wanted the fastest available cluster system for weather forecasting,’ said the head of the group responsible for weather forecasting for theSouth Korean Air Force. ‘This will provide us with faster and more immediate computing power and shorter analysis times, and will enable us to produce longer term forecasts in greater detail. Additionally, the project includes not only compute but also monitoring and administration services, plus archiving and security systems, as well as interconnection to outside agencies.’
The South Korean Air Force selected a combination of SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 and Spectra Logic T380 and T50e to provide performance, reliability and flexibility for its storage requirements.
