The Israeli-American tech firm Mellanox will provide data storage technology to the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts’ (ECMWF) next-generation supercomputer.
ECMWF signed a €80m (US$87m) deal in December for a new supercomputer for its forecasting operations.
Atos has partnered with Mellanox to fit the new system with Mellanox’s HDR InfiniBand product, a high-performance, end-to-end smart interconnect solution for data center servers and storage systems.
InfiniBand is scheduled to be installed alongside the Atos system at the new ECMWF data center currently being developed by the Italian government in Bologna sometime this year. As yet there has been no indication from the UK-based forecasting center of how the current Coronavirus pandemic could impact the construction schedule. The supercomputer is set to come online in 2021.
According to Mellanox, the new platform will allow for the running of probabilistic weather forecasts at nearly twice the resolution of the current system. Mellanox’s InfiniBand product is already being used by other meteorological agencies worldwide including Meteo France, the Finnish Meteorological Institute, China Meteorological Administration and NOAA in the USA.
Marcel Fouché, networking and storage general manager at Networks Unlimited Africa, which distributes Mellanox’s products throughout the continent, said, “The new supercomputer will be one of the world’s most powerful meteorological machines, supporting weather forecasting and prediction researchers from over 30 countries across Europe.”