The British government announced today that it will invest £1.2 billion (about $1.6 billion) over the next 10 years to build the world’s most powerful supercomputer for weather forecasting and climate modeling.

Of the total £1.2 billion investment, £854 million represents the “expected contractual value for the supercomputing capability.”

“Come rain or shine, our significant investment for a new supercomputer will further speed up weather predictions, helping people be more prepared for weather disruption from planning travel journeys to deploying flood defences,” U.K. Business and Energy Secretary Alok Sharma said in a statement. 

The planned system will be operated by the U.K.’s Met Office weather service and is expected to be at least 18 times faster than the agency’s current Cray XC40 cluster. That system, completed in 2016, ranks as the world’s 23rd most powerful supercomputer, with a peak speed of more than 8.1 petaflops, a standard measure translating to a quadrillion floating-point operations per second.

That means the new system will have a peak speed of 145 petaflops when fully kitted out. Were it operational today, it would be the second most powerful supercomputer in the world behind the U.S. Energy Department’s Summit system.

Development will be carried out piecemeal. In 2022, the year the Met Office’s current supercomputer cluster is scheduled to retire. A “first phase” installation six times faster than the current system will be delivered in 2022. Five years later, a “second phase” will boost the system’s speed by a factor of at least three.

The Met Office didn’t share further hardware details other than the fact that the supercomputer will incorporate graphics processing cards. GPUs are increasingly finding use in weather forecasting systems and are already widely employed for machine learning, a technology the Met Office might be looking to implement judging from its choice of hardware. Early research by Google LLC has shown that machine learning models may hold the potential to make near-future atmospheric predictions a lot more efficient.

Regardless of exactly what kind of software will run on the planned system, the project is set to offer a dramatic improvement in U.K. authorities’ ability to predict the weather. The new hardware will reportedly make it possible to enhance forecast resolutions tenfold from 10 kilometers now to just one. For areas with major airports, the Met Office is aiming for a further threefold improvement in resolution, to 300 meters. 

Officials have high hopes for the project. “This investment will ultimately provide earlier more accurate warning of severe weather, the information needed to build a more resilient world in a changing climate and help support the transition to a low carbon economy across the U.K.,” said Met Office Chief Executive Penny Endersby.

Accounting for everything, the British government is expecting a 19-pound benefit for every pound spent.

Separately, the Met Office, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. and a group of partners have been granted £4.1 million ($5.3 million) by the U.K.’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council to build a second supercomputer dubbed Isambard 2. The system, which will support research projects in areas such as healthcare, is the largest supercomputer in Europe to use Arm Ltd. chips under the hood.

Photo: Met Office