You know that climate change is a problem when a supercomputer to do short-term prediction of the formation of linear rainbands and the torrential downpours that they cause is 3.4X as powerful as the machines that do the day-to-day weather forecasting in a country. But this is precisely the situation in Japan, which will be firing up a new supercomputer to do a better job predicting such powerful and damaging storms.
Japan is an island located in the subtropics and has always had to deal with the vicissitudes of cyclones, typhoons, and other kinds of harsh weather. It is also a volcanic island in a tectonic subduction zone and has to worry further about earthquakes and tsunamis. In recent years, as the weather has gotten more intense and linear rainbands have become more common and stronger, the Japan Meteorological Agency has been given a mandate by the Japanese government to study these strong storms and to build a system that does a better job predicting when they will form so people and businesses can build plans for when they hit, thereby reducing loss of life and property.
Linear rainbands are slow-moving or nearly stationary cumulonimbus cloud formations that remain for several hours over the same area, often dumping heavy rains they have picked up, in this case over the Sea of Japan and potentially causing landslides and flooding. The idea is to provide a forecast for such events six to twelve hours ahead of when they will happen.
In July 2020, a linear rainband cutting across southern Japan caused very heavy rainfalls, flooding, and damage along the Kumagawa River in Kumamoto Prefecture.
Figuring out when a cyclone or set of thunderstorms will form into a linear rainband is not trivial, and since June 2022 researchers at the JMA and the RIKEN HPC center in Kobe have been working on a model that can predict the formation and duration of linear rainbands. The work was done on the “Fugaku” supercomputer at RIKEN, which is based on the Fujitsu A64FX Arm HPC processor and commercialized in the Fujitsu PrimeHPC FX1000 product line.
The peak theoretical performance of the linear rainband prediction system, which has not yet been given a nickname as far as we know, will be 31.1 petaflops and is comprised of 24 racks of PrimeHPC FX1000 systems. This PrimeHPC FX1000 system at JMA, which will become operational on March 1, has a 42.3 petabyte parallel file system.
The Fugaku system has well over 400 racks of A64FX server nodes and is rated at 537 petaflops of peak theoretical performance at double precision floating point. Importantly, the A64FX processing nodes, which have a single CPU, are equipped with 32 GB of HBM2 memory that delivers 1 TB/sec of memory bandwidth and that radically improves the performance of HPC simulations – provided you can get your solvers and data to fit into a 32 GB memory footprint.
Interestingly, Fujitsu is hosting the machine on behalf of JMA rather than the latter putting the 24 racks into its own datacenter. The idea is that Fujitsu has a secure facility and redundant power to help keep the machine from being taken out by power outages in the wake of earthquakes or floods.
The JMA’s pair of 9.13 petaflops weather forecasting systems, which were installed nearly five years ago in May 2018, are a pair of Cray XC50 systems based on two-socket “Skylake” Xeon SP nodes with 96 GB of memory each and the system had 2,816 nodes in total, interlinked with the “Aries” XC interconnect developed by Cray. The contract between Hitachi, which was the prime contractor for the Cray sale, was for the pair of XC50 machines to cost $36 million, with another $54 million allocated to run them over five years. That implies the contract will run out in May 2023, and either JMA will extend the contract or buy a new pair of machines to do the normal weather forecasting work. (For a history of supercomputing at JMA, take a look at this story we did when the XC50s were installed in 2018.) JMA started out in 1995 with Hitachi vector processors, moved to clusters of all-CPU IBM Power systems resold by Hitachi in the 2000s and 2010s, and then jumped to X86 iron in 2018.
It will be interesting to see if Fujitsu can win the next JMA system deal and steal it away from Hewlett Packard Enterprise, which bought Cray in May 2019 for $1.3 billion. As far as we know, JMA has not ported its weather codes to GPUs and we think there is a better than even chance it will look hard at HPE Cray XE “Shasta” systems based on “Sapphire Rapids” Xeon SPs with HBM2e memory and the Slingshot Ethernet interconnect as well as the Fujitsu PrimeHPC FX1000 systems based on the A64FX processor and the Tofu D interconnect. We will be watching to see what happens.
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When I was in Maryland (before France) we had NHK Networks on MPT channel 22-4 (PBS), and they gave very good weather forecasts (both for Japan and worldwide — which was otherwise missing from NBC/CBS/ABC). When Frontier finally came online and beat Fugaku at #1, the NHK News announcer seemed quite sad, and said “scientists say that despite this, they may still use Fugaku, for weather forecasting …” — very funny to me since Fugaku was now just #2 (not #200,000), and still a fantastic and extremely capable HPC machine! Moreover, with increasing droughts in the Western U.S., and western Europe, and increased flooding in the Eastern U.S., and eastern Asia, it seems to me that accurate weather (and climate) predictions are becoming increasingly important for us to plan for emergencies, contingencies, food production, water management, and industrial development (one may favor building fabs and datacenters closer to the poles than to the equator these days, especially if we keep getting 100F/37C summers in Paris…).
…yeah…just further replacing God by more and more IT which needs more and more energy…
…will not work…
…it is an endless game which we will not win…
…we should turn around 180° (not 360° as a special female politician from Germany might think) – seeking for peace with God, which is only possible via his son Jesus Christ who is the only one that can forgive our sins – then the Almighty is our father and we his children, which He protects…
…no other way, as He makes the weather and climate, and “teaches people what they know” as He says in his word, so we can never know what he knows, but only what he lets us know…(He even allows wars to start, and defines when they will end; He puts kings, governments e.g. into power, and ends their power when he wants (hopefully He will soon change some of them, which I pray for, as they work against his orders)
…no AI will change that, which btw. cannot save in the last judgement from hell, as, as said, only God’s son can forgive sins, as he paid the price for us and fulfilled all of the commandments we are never able to fulfill by heart (or can anybody love God fully and truly ba heart, soul and all his power, without interruption, as He wants it and say it in his word?…)…
…Jesus Christ is the only righteousness that God accepts – fully accepts without any doubts, and which one gets put on in the baptism (2.Co 5, 21 and Gal. 3, 27 – my only hope, but THE hope that survives everything, as it is completely without me involved – as I would always fail)…
Just had to say this, as I, who was a big fan of IT, starting with the PET, and of e.g. high performance CPUs, starting with the Alphas (and MIPS, PA-RISC,…) and did my half year internship at DEC for this reason (during the Compaq takeover), and still watching – had to say this, as it is more and more sad to see, how we are insisting on our knowledge and power, and making things just more and more bad, giving false hope in IT and science, and the only result we get is: the more we find out, the more we have to look at, and this will never end…we build things more and more complex, and build our everyday life on it, and don’t see, how thin the ice is on which we stand…and every day we do even more and more into the same direction, instead of turning to the only one, who can help and who freely does what He chooses, as He made everything – and will end everything, at the point of time He alone defines, when his son will come back and everything ends with the judgement day (if we just would still know at least that, and would stop believing, that the end would come via any other things which might happen, then we could say we knew at least something, but at the moment, we think that we are much smarter than people in the middle age – but they at least knew the basics about where we come from, who made us, what are his orders (which we turn upside down in different areas today, which He sees, and will not laugh about, as we can see with COVID, the growing war, prices going high,…)…
…the only thing AI will do is to destroy trust into everything written (and pictures and videos, when looking at the growing power of “fake-making”-algorithms), and by relying more and more on it, also in education, it will decrease intelligence, so that future generations will no longer be able to keep up the high pace and standards, so that the whole thing might collapse – and IT destroys itself by this…
Mr.Morgan thanks a lot for your always interesting articles, but as I read this comment, I had to reply (tried to make it short…), which is in no way meant personally against you Hubert, or against the quality of the article e.g.!
IT somehow was perhaps good and great as long as it was an addition to life, but today it more and more wants to be life itself, and is like a hydra, putting its head into any fibre of life it can; and when it has its heads there…
…then God might pull the plug…