South African Weather Services Upgrades Cray HPC

Cray Inc. was awarded contracts with Eclipse Holdings Ltd to expand and upgrade the South African Weather Service‘s (SAWS) Cray XC30-AC supercomputer and ClusterStor L300 storage system used for operational weather forecasting.

These upgrades provide SAWS with the additional compute and storage capacity required to handle the agency’s increased workload demands for providing the government, aviation, marine and other industries with crucial climate and weather forecasting information.

SAWS is one of over 20 national and military weather centers that depend on Cray to meet operational uptime and mission requirements every day. Cray’s long-standing relationship with SAWS has allowed the weather center to take on weather and climate modeling responsibilities as the only World Meteorological Organization (WMO) community member and long-range modeling center in Africa. The installation at SAWS was also Cray’s first-ever installation in Africa.

The XC30 supercomputer and Lustre file system at SAWS has been in operation since 2014 and experienced zero down time while in service. By choosing to upgrade its existing Cray system, SAWS was able to expand the system and meet operational requirements, doubling compute capacity and tripling its ClusterStor L300 storage system capacity.

“SAWS’ has experienced great success in the last four years using its existing Cray XC30 supercomputer and ClusterStor storage system,” said Nico Meintjes, CEO, Eclipse Holdings. “As SAWS began to receive more tasks from the South African government, doubling computing needs, this put significant strain on system performance. With these growing needs, expanding and upgrading its Cray solutions was clearly the strongest choice. Now, with the Cray upgrades in place, SAWS has doubled its compute capacity and has tripled storage capacity and bandwidth.“

“It’s an exciting time in weather forecasting as organizations embrace artificial intelligence to more accurately predict forecasts and weather patterns,” said Ilene Carpenter, earth sciences segment director, Cray. “As weather simulations grow more advanced and comprehensive, generating weather predictions is an increasingly data-intensive task. With the Cray system upgrades in place, SAWS has the storage and compute resources needed to handle an increasing number of hydro-meteorological observations and to run higher fidelity weather and climate models.“

Timely and accurate weather alerts and warnings help weather-sensitive sectors and the general public prepare for and mitigate the impact of severe weather events. SAWS’ research and forecasts, backed by supercomputing capabilities, play an important role in supporting decision makers at the local, provincial and national levels. These activities support South Africa’s WeatherSMART nation vision, innovating, adapting and facing the future together.

The upgrades were delivered in March 2018 and the system was relocated to a new data center by Cray and Eclipse Holdings in April 2018.