newsbytes@clarinet.com (01/18/90)
OFFENBACH, WEST GERMANY, 1990 JAN 17 (NB) -- The Deutscher Wetter Dienst (DWD), the West German weather service, has ordered a Cray Y-MP 4/432 supercomputer from Cray Research in the US. According to Dr Reiner Lamp, DWD's director of computer operations, the Cray system is already used by other European weather administrations, hence the West German institute's decision to purchase a machine. "We are familiar with the Cray Research system from our affiliation with the European center for medium-range weather forecasts (ECMWF)," he said. "This new system will provide the power we need to improve still further our numerical weather prediction and climate modelling capabilities," he added. The Cray Y-MP 4/432 computer has four microprocessors and 32 million 64-bit words of main memory. The DWD plans to use the machine to improve the accuracy of its one and three-day forecasts, as well as feeding the resulting data to other Crays on the ECMWF network to produced Europe-wide three to ten-day forecasts. The ECMWF network has 18 European national weather systems linked in to produce the medium to long-range weather forecasts. (Steve Gold/19900117)