Microsoft is building the world's most powerful weather supercomputer

Microsoft is building the world's most powerful weather supercomputer

Microsoft is building the world's most powerful weather supercomputer,The British are taking their weather obsession to new heights, as the UK today announced that it is advancing its project to build the world's most powerful climate and weather supercomputer with the help of Microsoft.

The country's weather service, the Bureau of Meteorology, has entered into a multi-million-pound agreement with the tech company for the project, which was previously earmarked to receive 1.2 billion pounds ($ 1.6 billion) in government funding.

And while the UK is already proud of its current weather supercomputer that can perform 16,000 trillion calculations per second, the new device will be twice as powerful.

By accessing more detailed climate models, the UK hopes to protect its cities and transport infrastructure in the future to protect them from extreme weather events.

The system is located in the south of the UK and is powered by 100% renewable energy. This system is expected to save 7,415 tonnes of CO2 in the first year of operation.

Once turned on next summer, the supercomputer also provides detailed simulations of local forecasts to help emergency services prepare for torrential rains and floods.

The new system may be a boon to rural communities hit by storms last year, which has led to calls for the government to create more sustainable sanitation systems.

According to scientists at the Climate Alliance, England has experienced major floods nearly every year since 2007, and the Met Office's Cray XC40 supercomputer relies in part on data provided by the public to make weather forecasts in remote parts of the UK.

The UK decided to seek help from Microsoft due to its cloud and quantum computing expertise.

The company has invested $ 1 billion in the Azure hosted supercomputer designed for Open AI startup, which is built to test large-scale AI models.

Microsoft says: The Open AI device - which includes 285,000 CPU cores and 10,000 GPUs - equates to the world's five best systems, and the title of the world's most powerful supercomputer currently belongs to the Japanese Fugaku computer.