Thanks to GPUs, the Swiss have made significant advancements in their ability to predict storms and other weather hazards with higher levels of accuracy. The Swiss Federal Office of Meteorology and Climatology, MeteoSwiss, is the first major national weather service to deploy a GPU-accelerated supercomputer to improve its daily weather forecasts.
The new system, powered by NVIDIA Tesla K80 GPU accelerators, is giving them a 40 times higher performance than their previous CPU-based system which now allows them to develop weather models with more than two times higher resolution and at three times higher energy efficiency.
MeteoSwiss is based on the Cray CS-Storm cluster supercomputer, one of the highest density GPU-accelerated systems available today. Expected to be fully operational by next summer, the MeteoSwiss system is housed at the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre in Lugano, Switzerland.
