This article has crossed my desk under the label "big computers". The understanding is that any large chunk of silicon and cable will pique the interest of a few hardware enthusiasts. Not just because the UK's Met Office has teamed up with Microsoft to build a massive supercomputer to track the weather and better understand climate change, but because it will be powered entirely by renewable energy.

According to the Met Office, which is responsible for all weather-related needs in the UK, the new supercomputer will provide more accurate weather models and scenarios to help predict and forecast, and help monitor and predict extreme weather events caused by climate change. [At least 1.2 billion pounds will be invested in the project, which will result in a state-of-the-art computer with more than twice the processing power of computers currently in the UK.

The full technical specifications have not yet been released, so it is not known whose chip it is running on, but it is said to have 60 petaflops of processing power. Japan's Fugaku, the world's fastest supercomputer, has a processing power of 420-440 petaflops in the standard LINPACK benchmark.

Nevertheless, this is very fast and will rank in the top 25 when this supercomputer appears next year.

This supercomputer will be built with the help of Cray, a company now owned by HP Enterprise; Cray has used chips from Nvidia, Intel, and AMD in past projects, so they are free to combine CPUs and GPUs from the companies most relevant for gaming PC hardware the CPUs and GPUs from the companies most relevant to gaming PC hardware.

These powerful GPUs are also very useful for much more than gaming, as we have seen firsthand with the latest cryptocurrency mining boon.

Importantly, however, the machine runs on 100% renewable energy. This feels like a smart move, not only for the environment, but also because this machine will spend a lot of time measuring and analyzing climate change.

[16] "As climate change evolves and policymakers make choices about the size of seawalls and where to build flood defenses, you'll think you were lucky your house didn't flood, Penny Endersby, chief executive of the Meteorological Office (via The Guardian), perhaps without holding your breath Says this.

In other words, it's a big computer, sure, but it's also a very useful and resourceful computer.