Weather and Climate

Success Stories - Weather & Climate

DWD - Deutscher Wetterdienst

DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst) is Germany’s National Meteorological Service. Their mission results from a legal mandate for information and research. As all meteorological services such as weather forecasts, storm warnings, climate projections are done in a global scale it requires a huge amount of computing capacity as the predictions have to be accurate and quick.  

SX-Aurora TSUBASA not only provides high computing power but also a very high memory bandwidth from which the forecast models benefit. Also due to the low power consumption there are roughly 20-30% more compute power compared to x86 within the same power envelope.

The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute - CHMI

The Czech Hydrometeorological Institute (CHMI) is a partly state-funded organisation and part of the critical infrastructure of the state established in 1953. It consists of three main divisions: Meteorology and Climatology, Hydrology, and Air Quality. One of the important cross-cutting purpose is regional weather modelling and the operational numerical weather prediction.

The CHMI put a new NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA supercomputer into service which is used for high-resolution regional climate modelling. The system is also simulating future climate, and how its changes will manifest themselves. For example, it helps to predict the future frequency and intensity of draught periods, and the change of extremity of weather phenomena like flash floods and strong winds. The ultimate goal is therefore to help prepare for adaptation measures, mitigating the impacts of the changing climate. In addition, it acts as a development system for the adaptation and optimization of certain meteorological codes and climate applications that benefit greatly from the vectorization on SX-Aurora TSUBASA.

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NEC SX-Aurora TSUBASA helps in predicting river floods 6 hours ahead

Floods are among the worst of natural disasters. From any metric – financial loss to the human toll, floods rank alongside earthquakes, tsunamis, and hurricanes. Being an island country, Japan experiences heavy rains, resulting in subsequent damage throughout the year. To combat the situation and facilitate quick evacuation, Mitsui Consultants Co. Ltd, Disaster Prevention Research Institute-Kyoto University and NEC Corporation have developed ' A National Version of the Real-time Inundation Prediction System' by using Rainfall-Runoff Inundation (RRI) model. The system allows immediate analysis and prediction of simple river channel flow into flood inundation 6 hours ahead in time by recording rainfall data. This system is built on a centralized ecosystem and embraces all rivers (major and minor) in Japan.

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