NEC scoops supercomputer Met Office deal

The current holder of the world's most powerful supercomputer title, NEC, has beaten off arch-rival IBM to scoop a deal with the Met Office worth £27.5m over three years.

The Met Office, which uses a supercomputer for weather forecasting, has to upgrade its machine every three years. Its current installation is from Cray, once renowned as the world's largest and most famous supercomputer company.

IBM was among several other vendors defeated by NEC.

Dr Joerg Stadler, marketing manager of NEC Germany, claimed this was because the company had a better price performance than IBM.

The SX-6 NEC supercomputer is technologically similar to the NEC Earth Simulator, which was recently crowned the world's most powerful supercomputer after toppling one of IBM's machines.

The SX-6 has a processor capable of making eight billion calculations per second. The Met Office machine will have eight of these very powerful processors in each cabinet inside the machine with a total of 30 cabinets in the supercomputer as a whole. And by 2004, NEC is promising that the Met Office will have a machine with 12.5 times the computer power of its current Cray supercomputer.

Stadler also predicted that while NEC would retain its top spot on the list of the world's 500 most powerful computers for the next two and half years, it would eventually lose out to either IBM's Blue Gene or the ASCI US National Security project.

The Met Office contract is NEC's largest ever supercomputer deal outside of Japan.