Atos supercomputer to enhance weather prediction capabilities for leading European numerical weather centre ECMWF

Paris, France; London, UK, January 13, 2020 – Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, has signed a new four-year contract worth over €80 million (approximately £67.8 million) with the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) to supply its BullSequana XH2000 supercomputer, which is one of the most powerful meteorological supercomputers in the world. It will increase ECMWF’s computing power by a factor of around 5 and will support hundreds of researchers from over 30 countries across Europe in their work on medium and long-range weather forecasting and prediction. Notably, it will enable them to reliably predict the occurrence and intensity of extreme weather events significantly ahead of time, essential to respond to the climate and weather crisis facing us today.

“Weather forecasting is computationally intensive and demands the best in high performance computing power” said Dr Florence Rabier, Director General at ECMWF. “This is one of the main reasons we chose Atos. We trust in its ability to supply and integrate the best technologies available, but also in its proven expertise to deliver effective solutions to the weather forecasting community across Europe.  Thanks to this investment, we will now be able to run higher resolution forecasts in under an hour, meaning better information will be shared with our Member States even faster to enable much improved weather forecasts as they combine this enhanced information with their own data and predictions. As governments and society continue to grapple with the impacts of increasingly severe weather, we are also proud to be relying on a supercomputer designed to maximise energy efficiency."

Once operational, the new supercomputer will allow ECMWF to run its flagship world-wide 15-day ensemble prediction at a higher resolution of around 10km, offering significant improvement in the ability to forecast severe weather events.

            Sophie Proust, Atos Group CTO said: “We’re really delighted to have been selected by ECMWF for this major contract. This is testament not only to our solid expertise and operational excellence needed to install, manage and run such a large system, but also to the best-of-breed technology which we are supplying, with our BullSequana XH2000 and our partners AMD, Mellanox and DDN. This new solution will optimize ECMWF's current workflow to enable it to deliver vastly improved numerical weather predictions. Most importantly though, this is a long-term collaboration, one in which we will work closely with ECMWF to explore new technologies in order to be prepared for next-generation applications. “