This put up was co-authored by Gayle Sheppard, Company Vice President, World Growth and Transformation.
The UK Meteorological Workplace (Met Workplace) is working with Microsoft to ship superior supercomputing capabilities for climate and local weather analysis, guaranteeing the continuation of the Met Workplace’s worldwide management on this space.
Supercomputing is prime to the Met Workplace’s climate and local weather science and companies. Microsoft Azure’s supercomputing-as-a-service will allow the Met Workplace to leverage the perfect mix of devoted and public cloud companies to offer extra correct predictions to assist residents and companies plan day by day actions, higher put together for excessive climate, and deal with the challenges related to local weather change.
Microsoft Azure will combine HPE Cray EX supercomputers from Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE), plus a Microsoft high-performance energetic information archive system, and different Azure cloud applied sciences, together with an end-to-end managed service to ship this market-leading supercomputing-as-a-service. The partnership may even embody innovation companies to help the Met Workplace in exploiting future applied sciences, similar to AI, plus commercialization alternatives.
Work on the challenge begins instantly, with the supercomputing functionality changing into operational beginning July 2022. The supercomputer is inbuilt 4 quadrants to optimize operational resilience for mission-critical supercomputing functionality. Every quadrant will include an HPE Cray EX supercomputer built-in into Azure, initially utilizing third era AMD EPYC processors, which is able to later be augmented with subsequent era AMD EPYC processors. The primary era of the supercomputer resolution may have a mixed complete of over 1.5 million processor cores and over 60 petaflops, in any other case often known as 60 quadrillion (60,000,000,000,000,000) calculations per second of mixture peak computing capability. Microsoft will ship additional upgrades in computing functionality over the ten years.
The energetic information archive system will help almost four exabytes of knowledge with high-performance information storage, question, and retrieval capabilities. The Met Workplace may even use Azure high-performance computing (HPC) cloud options similar to HB-series InfiniBand clusters powered with AMD EPYC processors.
Seeking to the longer term
As a part of this settlement, the supercomputing functionality might be based mostly within the South of the UK and might be powered via using 100 p.c renewable vitality and market-leading vitality effectivity, saving 7,415 tonnes of CO2 within the first yr of operational service alone. This collaboration with the Met Workplace builds on Microsoft’s dedication to a extra sustainable future by lowering our environmental footprint, accelerating analysis, and serving to our prospects create sustainable options.
This partnership showcases Microsoft Azure’s distinctive skill to ship mission-critical supercomputing built-in with cloud computing on the largest scales. Microsoft stays the one public cloud supplier giving prospects entry to the total spectrum of HPC capabilities spanning devoted supercomputers, InfiniBand HPC clusters with sector-leading real-world software efficiency and scalability, and a plethora of Digital Machine sorts with low latency networking. Throughout the globe, Azure is persistently demonstrating our skill to place real HPC capabilities into the arms of the broadest vary of consumers and customers, enabling them to unlock their particular person improvements.
