Bom to get new super computer

[Rustic Charm]

New weather forecasting coming to Australia. Bound to be good news I would think

My Sailing: Faster, more accurate weather forecasts promised by BOM

[karle]

A $59 million computer. That's a lot of $$$$$$$!!!

Originally Posted by Rustic Charm

New weather forecasting coming to Australia. Bound to be good news I would think

My Sailing: Faster, more accurate weather forecasts promised by BOM

[44'cruisingcat]

It'd be nice f they got a few right. I reckon 80% of my fuel bill (dinghy excluded)is due to inaccurate weather forecasts.

[jstevens]

Additional computation power is always a good thing for wx forecasting.
When I was a USAF WX forecaster/programmer around 1970 I was on a visit to the US Weather Bureau and talked to a programmer working on the development of the numerical models. They were waiting on the acquisition of the latest Cray computer to improve the model performance. At the time it took over 72 hours of wall clock time to produce a 48 hour forecast. I thought that was a real problem, but the programmer pointed out the positive side of this situation - to verify the forecast they only needed yesterday's newspaper.

John

[jwcolby54]

In 1985 I worked at a startup which was building a mini-supercomputer. It was a 64 bit machine, could process an astounding 200 million instructions per second and had an astounding 16 million bytes of RAM.

My smart phone has FOUR processors all of which can process 2 BILLION instructions per second, and which has 3 BILLION bytes of RAM. And all it does is provide me with personalized computing, makes phone calls, draws maps showing my car on the map and stuff like that.

My smart phone is around 100 times more powerful than the mini-super I worked on back then.

[Rustic Charm]

Originally Posted by jwcolby54

In 1985 I worked at a startup which was building a mini-supercomputer. It was a 64 bit machine, could process an astounding 200 million instructions per second and had an astounding 16 million bytes of RAM.

My smart phone has FOUR processors all of which can process 2 BILLION instructions per second, and which has 3 BILLION bytes of RAM. And all it does is provide me with personalized computing, makes phone calls, draws maps showing my car on the map and stuff like that.

My smart phone is around 100 times more powerful than the mini-super I worked on back then.

Yep, the Apollo Guidance Computer that led the guys to the moon and back was 64kb. But without it, getting there and returning would have been impossible to calculate. 64kb is less than a pocket calculator.

[grantmc]

Originally Posted by jwcolby54

... My smart phone has FOUR processors all of which can process 2 BILLION instructions per second, and which has 3 BILLION bytes of RAM. And all it does is provide me with personalized computing, makes phone calls, draws maps showing my car on the map and stuff like that.

Any chance you would donate BOM your phone and save the them $59 million?

[jwcolby54]

Originally Posted by grantmc

Any chance you would donate BOM your phone and save the them $59 million?

LOL. Believe me, supercomputers have moved on. My cell phone is basically the equivalent of 4 out of about 100,000 nodes of a modern super.

[rajcruiser]

Originally Posted by Rustic Charm

New weather forecasting coming to Australia. Bound to be good news I would think

My Sailing: Faster, more accurate weather forecasts promised by BOM

This is great, BOm saved my bacon many times, for those on a budget their radar gives a very recent picture on where the squalls are going etc. not to mention a string of recent natural disasters the impact of which somewhat mitigated by their forecasts.

[Reefmagnet]

Cyclone track forecasts have been getting better and better in recent times. This should just continue the trend.

[Rustic Charm]

I'm looking for an education with this question as I don't know how 'apps' work.

But, I was under the impression that our BOM is 'the' weather people/organisation and that all computer apps and weather routing apps somehow downloaded information from BOM

So, I've had the opinion that the BOM is THE reliable as can be source. Is this correct?