Meteorology building $30m supercomputer

in brief Australia's Bureau of Meteorology and the Australian National University this morning revealed they had inked a four-year, $30 million deal with Sun Microsystems to build a new high-performance computing (HPC) system to support weather forecasting.

Sun issued a statement this morning saying the system would consist of more than 2,500 blade servers using Intel's Nehalem and Sun's Constellation architectures, in a set-up divided between Canberra and Melbourne. The system will run a Linux edition of Sun's HPC software.

"This implementation will position the Bureau as the world's first major weather service to operate within an open source environment," said BOM CIO Phil Tannenbaum in the statement. "It's a move away from where we've been traditionally been operating, and we believe the Sun infrastructure will benefit our operational systems, as well as our research and development users."