The Bureau of Meteorology has bought a disaster recovery high performance computing (HPC) system to improve the resilience of the supercomputer used to predict Australia’s weather events.
HPE will supply the DR HPC system under a three-year contract worth $49.3 million, supplementing an existing Cray XC50 supercomputer.
BOM began using a Cray XC40 supercomputer in June 2016, with the aim of improving its weather modelling capability compared to a former Oracle/Sun-based HPC system.
When commissioned, the supercomputer, dubbed ‘Australis’, was expected to be 16 times faster than its existing HPC, boasting a peak performance of 1.6 petaflops.
In 2020, the bureau said a mid-term upgrade of the hardware to a 4.0 petaflop Cray XC50 and CS500 system, Australis II, would “deliver double the computing and storage”.
A spokesperson told iTnews that the “bureau is expanding its HPC capability”, and that the new DR HPC will “provide greater resilience to its digital and data services”.
It will also “allow for increased data sharing with other government agencies, additional research capacity and support... operations during peak periods of high-impact weather events”.
The spokesperson declined to comment on the technical specifications of the system, or whether it replaces an existing capability.
“Due to commercial-in-confidence arrangements, the bureau cannot provide any further details about the contract,” the spokesperson added.
The new contract comes a year after HPE scored a novated deal to continue to support Australis until the end of June 2025.
But that contract, which was valued at $12 million when it was signed, fell to just $25,276 earlier this year following an amendment.
