At its 68th session on 10-11 December 2007, the ECMWF Council authorised the Director to enter into a service contract with IBM United Kingdom Ltd to replace the High Performance Computing Facility (HPCF) at the Centre from 2009 onwards. The contract between ECMWF and IBM UK Ltd was signed on 20 December 2007.
Caroline Isaac (Deep Computing Business Unit Executive, IBM United Kingdom, Ireland and South Africa), Dominique Marbouty (Director, ECMWF), Andy Sharples (Director, IBM Global Finance UK)
IBM will provide a POWER6 system for the period 2009-2010, to be replaced with a future POWER system for the period 2011 to mid-2013.
Severe weather is predicted to become more frequent and more intense in some parts of the world under climate change. ECMWF will contribute to mitigating the effects of climate change by providing early warnings of severe weather. This is seen as a key contribution to help society adapt to the dangers and threats associated with global warming. The increased time gained by such warnings will be crucial to save lives, enabling people to be evacuated from endangered areas (for instance, in the event of the storm surges in the North Sea, such as in November 2007), or to take precautionary action to avoid major threats to goods during severe storms, such as ‘Kyrill’ in January 2007 that affected mainly Western and Central Europe. The new computer system will help ECMWF to further improve its global numerical weather prediction models, in particular by increasing the resolution of the forecast system and by making the best use of satellite data, which will enable the Centre to provide useful information for early warnings of severe weather events.