The supercomputer for Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau aims to help mitigate the threats posed by natural disasters like typhoons and heavy rain
Fujitsu recently announced the development of a supercomputer system for Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau (CWB) for use in numerical weather forecasting. The company said that the new system started operation in June 2022 under an initiative that was initially implemented in 2021. The program will be extended in stages over a period of three years. To be completed in December 2023, Fujitsu expects the final system to achieve a theoretical peak performance of 10 PFLOPS*, making it the fastest supercomputer in Taiwan.
The new system is primarily based on Fujitsu’s supercomputer “FUJITSU Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000” hardware, which features the same A64FX CPU as the supercomputer Fugaku, jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu.
Fujitsu’s new system claims to enable the CWB to promote advanced weather observation, improve observation and forecast accuracy of weather disasters, and strengthen its efforts to observe and analyze the long-term impacts of climate change in addition to daily weather forecasting services.
As per the official statement, it will further support the CWB in diversifying weather services as a key element in its infrastructure to promote of smart and advanced weather services, one of the targets of the CWB’s mid-term plan. Fujitsu will continue providing its technical expertise in high-performance computing (HPC) and know-how in weather services.
Japan-based Fujitsu is a digital services company that works as a sustainable digital transformation partner in over 100 countries with 124,000 employees and provides services and solutions with Computing, Networks, AI, Data & Security, and Converging Technologies.
*PFLOPS is Peta Floating-point Operations Per Second; A thousand trillion (1015) FLOPS, meaning a thousand trillion floating-point calculations per second.
