Fujitsu develops supercomputer system for Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau for numerical weather forecasting

Jan 17, 2023 11:27 JST

Source: Fujitsu Ltd

New system will contribute to the realization of safe and resilient society in Taiwan

TOKYO, Jan 17, 2023 - (JCN Newswire) - Fujitsu today announced the development of a supercomputer system for Taiwan's Central Weather Bureau (hereinafter CWB)(1) for use in numerical weather predictions. 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, and the final system, which will be completed in December 2023, is expected to achieve theoretical peak performance of 10 PFLOPS(2), making it the fastest supercomputer in Taiwan.

With its tropical and subtropical climate, Taiwan sits in one of the regions of the world most vulnerable to natural disasters including typhoons and heavy rain.

The new system will help mitigate the threats posed to Taiwan by such disasters, enabling 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. 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.

The 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 will continue to support the CWB's weather forecast services by providing its high reliable technical expertise in high performance computing (HPC) and know-how in weather services in general.

(1) Central Weather Bureau :
Location: Taipei City; Director-General: Cheng, Ming-Dean
(2) PFLOPS :
Peta Floating-point Operations Per Second; A thousand trillion (1015) FLOPS, meaning a thousand trillion floating-point calculations per second

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