Refining the Weather Report With Itanium 2-Based Servers

Overview

The Finnish Meteorological Institute (FMI) is relied on to provide accurate forecasts for national news channels and industry groups including civic authorities and agricultural bodies. To develop truly accurate predictions, the FMI has always relied on High Performance Computing (HPC) but traditionally shared the only platform in Finland, located at the Central Scientific Computing Centre, with other academic groups. To further its research, the FMI recognized the need to purchase a scalable and reliable HPC solution that would offer any-time access to key data and analysis tools. After a two-month benchmark process in early 2005, the FMI chose to install two Intel Itanium 2 processor-based SGI Altix 3700 BX2 machines running Unix, which proved their value in meeting the Institute's price performance criteria.