IBM has won a contract to install a new supercomputer for the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which will use it for weather and climate modeling, the company announced earlier this week.

Accuracy of NOAA’s daily weather forecasts and warnings of tornadoes, hurricanes, thunderstorms and snowstorms depends on performance of supercomputers the administration uses, IBM said.

The US$502m contract includes both the high-performance computing (HPC) system and managed services to support it. The managed services piece includes a primary and a back-up data center, application support, system administration and program management.

IBM has proposed an architecture for the HPC system that is built on its newest iDataPlex servers in conjunction with its high-capacity disk storage. High-speed file access is ensured by IBM’s General Parallel File System, an advanced file system specifically for HPC clusters.

Louis Uccellini, director of NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental predictions, said this was a continuation of the administration’s long relationship with IBM.

“IBM has provided dependable and scalable high performance computing capabilities over the last ten years and NOAA looks forward to the continuing partnership to provide the systems needed for improved decision support services in building a weather-ready nation,” Uccellini said.

In addition to climate and weather, the new system will increase NOAA’s ability to track ocean and space-weather information faster and with greater accuracy.