Mellanox Selected by European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts

Mellanox Technologies, Ltd. announced that 200 Gigabit HDR IB has been selected by the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to accelerate their new HPC, based on Atos’ latest BullSequana XH2000 technology.

By leveraging HDR IB’s fast data throughout low latency, and smart In-Network Computing engines, the customer will enhance, speed up, and increase the accuracy of weather forecasting and predictions.

“We require the best supercomputing power and the best technologies available for our numerical weather prediction activities,” said Dr Florence Rabier, director general, ECMWF. “With the new supercomputing capabilities, we will now be able to run higher resolution forecasts in under an hour and enable much improved weather forecasts. As governments and society continue to grapple with the impacts of increasingly severe weather, we are also proud to be relying on a HPC designed to maximize energy efficiency.“

The new HPC to be deployed in 2020 will be one of the world’s most powerful meteorological HPCs, supporting weather forecasting and prediction researchers from over 30 countries across Europe. The platform, utilizing HDR IB, will enable running nearly 2 times higher-resolution probabilistic weather forecasts in under an hour, improving the ability to monitor and predict increasingly severe weather phenomena and enable European countries to take proactive precautions to protect lives and property.

“We are proud to have our 200 Gb/s HDR IB solutions accelerate one of the most powerful meteorological services HPCs in the world, at the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts,” said Gilad Shainer, SVP marketing, Mellanox. “Climate and weather simulations are compute and data intensive, and require the most advanced interconnect technology to ensure fast and accurate results. HDR IB includes multiple data acceleration and analysis engines, making it the leading technology for such applications. We look forward to continuing work with ECMWF and Atos, to develop the supercomputing capabilities needed for even more accurate and complex simulations in the future.“

The technological advantages of IB for climate research and weather forecasting applications have driven many of meteorological service agencies to accelerate their HPC platforms. Examples include also Meteo France (France), the Finnish Meteorological Institute (Finland), China Meteorological Administration (China), Beijing Meteorological Service (China), the National Center for Atmospheric Research (USA).

“The combination of Mellanox’s HDR IB solution and Atos’ BullSequana XH2000 HPC delivers industry leading supercomputing technology to accelerate meteorological applications, along with other compute and data intensive applications,” said Andy Grant, group VP, large strategic HPC deals, Atos. “The combined technology has been selected by leading agencies such as Meteo France and the Finnish Meteorological Institute for their new HPCs. We are excited to build another BullSequana XH2000 – 200G HDR IB HPC in 2020 and to be working together to improve Europe’s ability to understand and predict weather and climate phenomena.“