Allinea DDT and Allinea MAP are to play a key role in a computer upgrade for France’s national weather service.
Météo-France operates as part of the country’s Ministry of Sustainable Development, with a mission to observe and forecast the atmosphere, snow cover and oceans’ surface to ensure the security of life and property in France and its territories. Météo-France also takes part in global climate-change research with various partners.
The agency has been doing this work on a vector supercomputer with a limited capability of 40 teraflops.
In 2013, French computer company Bull will install two supercomputers in Toulouse – one at Météopole and the other at the new Espace Clément Ader research centre. Each supercomputer will be rated at more than 500 teraflops, for total processing power of more than one petaflop. By 2016, the systems will be further upgraded for a computing capability of more than five petaflops.
'For the first phase, we will significantly increase the computing power,' said Damien Déclat, the project’s director for Bull. 'Computing power is a key element for meteorology and climate science. This upgrade will enable further progress in weather forecasting and climate research for Météo-France.
'As an example, the Meteo-France's local area model (called AROME) will be much more geographically precise thanks to the new configuration and thanks to the different tools allowing an efficient use of the computer.'
