Once, a strip of seaweed, a fir-cone or a rheumatic hip were all that were needed to forecast the weather, but nowadays we appear to have to to spend £33 million to get it right.
Well ...nearly right.....sometimes.
Yesterday, the Met Office unveiled a super-computer that it hopes will be able to do the job with a little more precision.
The IBM machine is more powerful than 100,000 standard PCs combined. For the technically minded, that means it will have a speed of one petaflop, placing it among the world’s top 20 most powerful computers.
It is capable of performing 125 trillion calculations per second.
And the next object is a....."Petaflop".
Lets hope this is better than a megaflop!
Thirty three million pounds is a 'hell of a lorra money'.
Think of all the hospitals/schools you could build with that.
For those less than technically minded, that means it may no longer be necessary for forecasters at the Met Office to look out of the window to find out what the weather is doing.
The IBM occupies two halls each the size of a football pitch at the Met Office’s headquarters in Exeter. It will use 1.2 megawatts of power, enough for a small town, provoking criticism from environmentalists.
Criticism....and so it should.
Although the machine was switched on this week, it will take two months to boot up fully and will not be running at peak performance until after an upgrade in 2011.
Two months....at 1.2 megawatts .....just to boot up!
Lets hope they don't have too many "cont+alt+del's" then!!!!!
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