Met Office deploys 60-petaflops cloud supercomputer for weather forecasting

The UK Met Office has completed a major milestone in its supercomputing programme by moving its operational forecasting and climate research to a fully managed cloud platform, according to metoffice.gov.uk metoffice.gov.ukmetoffice.gov.ukmetoffice.gov.ukOpen source ↗. Delivered in phases alongside Microsoft, the system provides a computing capacity of approximately 60 quadrillion calculations per second across around 1.8 million processor cores. The implementation protects service continuity while increasing processing throughput for national meteorology services.

Computational capacity and data pipeline

The new high-performance architecture ingests and processes more than 50 billion individual weather observations on a daily basis. Alongside the compute cluster, the Met Office migrated its storage pipeline to a cloud-based Managed Archive Storage System (MASS), replacing the previous on-premises archive hardware located in Exeter. This storage setup is designed to store the escalating data volumes generated by higher-resolution atmospheric models.

The hardware replacement took place across two primary stages. Phase one established a like-for-like operational baseline to mirror the previous on-premises system without service interruptions, while phase two scaled the operational cluster to its current performance profile. Managing operations through a dedicated cloud service grants 24-hour maintenance and infrastructure security directly from the vendor.

Simulation resolution and application domains

The upgraded platform improves how physics models resolve atmospheric events, including precipitation formation and localized weather processes metoffice.gov.ukmetoffice.gov.ukmetoffice.gov.ukOpen source ↗. Scientists can run climate projection models at significantly finer grid resolutions while running larger ensemble simulations simultaneously. These ensembles allow researchers to assess atmospheric risks with higher statistical confidence.

Operational outputs from the system supply forecasts and warnings across civil sectors including aviation, transport, flood defense, and energy grid management. According to the agency, the system's enhanced predictive capacity is projected to generate £11.3 billion in socioeconomic benefits across the United Kingdom.