Supercomputer to give the edge on Games weather
The government has spent $1.5 million on a 'supercomputer' that will be used to help the mainland predict the weather during the 2008 Beijing Olympics.
Scientific officer Wong Wai-kin said the Observatory installed the Superblade HPC - which is not yet fully operational - a few weeks ago.
'The machine is made up of 30 blades, containing two computers each. Each blade can function alone but can also communicate with the others to form one high-performance computer,' he said.
'We are now working on the software to make this thing work. Once it is operational it can predict severe weather - like rain and thunderstorms - six hours ahead of them happening. It will also expand the types of severe weather warning we can forecast.'
At the moment rainstorms can be predicted only three hours before they happen.
Using the software now being designed by the Observatory, the supercomputer - which was bought from a Shenzhen company, Galactic Computing - will act as a forecaster, making its own predictions by compiling radar, satellite and Observatory data.
In addition, it will detect things like thunderstorms and squalls using algorithms developed by five scientific officers working full-time on the project. The prediction of weather within a 0-6 hour time period, called 'now-casting' is usually done by human forecasters.
Mr Wong said, armed with the information from the new computer, weather forecasters will be able to warn the government to arrange traffic changes earlier than they can now.
He said the entire system - hardware and software - is 100 per cent Chinese-made, and development and testing will be completed in time for the Olympics.
'The software will be mature enough to be used in two years - just in time for the Beijing Olympics. If the computers we bought become obsolete by then we can buy new ones but we will have tested the software,' he said.
'The US, UK, Canada and Australia have provided their versions of this now-casting system. Forecasters from all these countries will be sitting together to make the most accurate forecasts.
'With this new computer and software we will be at the same level as the other international forecasting systems.'
Before Hong Kong's addition, all the systems - apart from Beijing's local forecasting system - were from western countries.
