Fujitsu today announced the development of a supercomputer system for Taiwan’s Central Weather Bureau (hereinafter CWB)(1) for use in numerical weather predictions. The new system started operation in June 2022 under an initiative that was initially implemented in 2021. The program will be extended in stages over a period of three years, and the final system, which will be completed in December 2023, is expected to achieve theoretical peak performance of 10 PFLOPS(2), making it the fastest supercomputer in Taiwan.
With its tropical and subtropical climate, Taiwan sits in one of the regions of the world most vulnerable to natural disasters including typhoons and heavy rain.
The new system will help mitigate the threats posed to Taiwan by such disasters, enabling the CWB to promote advanced weather observation, improve observation and forecast accuracy of weather disasters, and strengthen its efforts to observe and analyze the long-term impacts of climate change in addition to daily weather forecasting services. It will further support the CWB in diversifying weather services as a key element in its infrastructure to promote of smart and advanced weather services, one of the targets of the CWB’s mid-term plan.
The system is primarily based on Fujitsu’s supercomputer “FUJITSU Supercomputer PRIMEHPC FX1000” hardware, which features the same A64FX CPU as the supercomputer Fugaku, jointly developed by RIKEN and Fujitsu.
Fujitsu will continue to support the CWB’s weather forecast services by providing its high reliable technical expertise in high performance computing (HPC) and know-how in weather services in general.
(1) Central Weather Bureau :
Location: Taipei City; Director-General: Cheng, Ming-Dean
(2) PFLOPS :
Peta Floating-point Operations Per Second; A thousand trillion (1015) FLOPS, meaning a thousand trillion floating-point calculations per second
Fujitsu’s Commitment to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs)
The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted by the United Nations in 2015 represent a set of common goals to be achieved worldwide by 2030. Fujitsu’s purpose — “to make the world more sustainable by building trust in society through innovation” — is a promise to contribute to the vision of a better future empowered by the SDGs.
