By March 2004, a supercomputer made up of 30 NEC SX-6 nodes will be running at the Met Office's new HQ site in Exeter. This will deliver approximately six times the combined power of the Met Office's two current Cray T3E computers. A year later, more nodes will be added, taking the total power available to twelve and a half times the current system.

The agreement demonstrates the long-term confidence of the Met Office in NEC's ability to deliver groundbreaking computing solutions. Not only will weather forecasts benefit from the extra power, building on increased data available from a new generation of satellites, but also climate models run on the supercomputer will provide improved predictions of high-impact climate change. Climate change predictions will become even more authoritative through increases in resolution, representation of new processes and the use of ensemble predictions to provide risk assessments.

Alan Dickinson, Director of Numerical Weather Prediction for the Met Office, stated: "This is a promising start for the move to Exeter and our supercomputer upgrade programme. The new NEC SX-6 system, will allow us to use higher-resolution models with improved representation of the physical processes, enabling us to provide more accurate forecasts of both short-range weather and longer-term climate trends."

This is the first visible outcome from the project set up in year 2000, to ensure that the Met Office maintains the computing capability it requires. It identified a need for computer upgrades in 2003 and 2006, when the organisation has moved from its headquarters Bracknell, to purpose-built offices in Exeter. Alan Dickinson continued: "The success of this initial phase demonstrates the Met Office's determination to remain the acknowledged world leader in both numerical weather prediction and the prediction of climate change, and should ensure that our new facilities at Exeter remain at the cutting edge."

Masaharu Sudoh, Managing Director of NEC High Performance Computing Europe, added: "NEC is committed to providing the Met Office with the best supercomputer solution possible, further enhancing its outstanding prediction capabilities. We are delighted with the smooth implementation of this initial phase. With close to 100 units of this new series of supercomputers installed in Europe, this is a landmark event for NEC."

The SX-6 Series from NEC delivers a high sustained performance for large-scale computations. To deliver approximately six times the combined power of the Met Office's two current Cray T3E computers, NEC will install 240 processors of the SX-6 Series in parallel. Each has peak vector performance of 8 Gigaflop/s, which is the fastest technical processor available. The high throughput performance of the SX-6 Series is achieved by employing ultra-high-speed Dynamic Random Access Memory (DRAM) and state-of-the-art LSI technology. Large memory and high data transfer rates between memories and CPUs are very important for obtaining high-sustained performance for large-scale computations.