Cloud Computing Gets Breezier In The UK
or
The IBM refurbished market could be poised to get a whole lot bigger.
The Met Office (the primary weather forecasting service for the UK) is about to replace their IBM P6 supercomputer installed in 2008 (and fully operational in 2009) for a cost about £30 million with a brand-spanking new Cray XC40 for a cost of about £97 million.
What does a major government agency get for almost 100 million pounds?
- 480 Intel Xeon processor cores performing calculations at 16 petaflops (16,000 trillion calculations per second)
- Storage capacity of 17-20+ petabytes with more than 1.5 TB per-second of bandwidth
- 2,000,000,000 GB working memory
- Most likely, a “warranty” that will cover any costs required by the computer to function during its lifetime at Met Office.
- Free delivery
Well, we aren’t so sure on that last one.
When and if all those IBM P6 nodes from the computer to be replaced hit the refurb market, we’ll be the first to let you know.