Swiss First to Tap GPUs to Improve National Weather Forecasts

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Ten years ago, Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans. Three years ago, Hurricane Sandy battered New York City. Hundreds lost their lives. Damages were in the billions. Wherever you live, predicting the weather is a high-stakes game. Now, thanks to GPU-accelerated computing, the Swiss have made significant advancements in their ability to predict storms and other weather hazards with higher levels of accuracy. The Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, is the first major national weather service to deploy a GPU-accelerated supercomputer to improve its daily weather forecasts.

Our forecast: They won’t be the last. Accurate weather forecasting requires vast amounts of computing performance. Unleashing that computing horsepower—without sucking power grids dry—is an ideal fit for GPUs. The new system provides 40 times higher performance than the CPU-based system it’s replacing. It allows MeteoSwiss to develop weather models with more than two times higher resolution—and at three times higher energy efficiency.
 
I know our own national weather center in the United States is in the middle of a big upgrade themselves. I don't remember the exact details of what they are upgrading, but it's suppose to be roughly 10x more powerful than what we have now, or in other words, catching up to what Europe has had for years. Last I heard they were planning to have it all done by this October. (This was announced sometime in January 2015) They were petitioning Congress (ha good luck with that with our incompetent leaders who say no to everything except billionaire tax cuts) for a further 50 million to further improve and surpass Europes system, but it of course got nowhere.
 
Inb4 someone blames Gameworks for losing their house in a tornado that wasn't predicted by the system....
 
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