The new system should be fully operational by October and will eventually boast a 5 petaflop capacity, nearly double what close observers of the National Weather Service had anticipated. One petaflop is equivalent to a million billion floating point calculations per second.
These supercomputing upgrades will significantly improve our ability to translate data into actionable information...
The upgrade would have come sooner, but last year IBM sold its supercomputing division to Lenovo, a Chinese company. “That froze us,” National Weather Service Director Louis Uccellini recently told Mashable. Having its supercomputers made by a Chinese company raised “red flags” in Congress, so a new deal had to be assembled from scratch. -Slate.com
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