China buys an IBM supercomputer

August 16, 2007

The Beijing Meteorological Bureau in China has purchased an IBM supercomputer to produce weather forecasts during the 2008 Olympic Summer Games.

Officials said the IBM p575 computer will provide 10 times the computational power of the bureau's current weather forecasting system. After the Games, the supercomputer will be used to improve the accuracy of forecasts in the areas around Beijing and to help predict air quality in the city.

The system is capable of sweeping up to 17,000 square miles to provide hourly numerical weather forecasts for each square mile.

IBM said the 80-node supercomputer can deliver a peak performance of 9.8 teraflops, or one trillion operations per second.

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