You have to admit it makes sense: The country that spends the most time per capita whining about the weather — the United Kingdom — is investing in the world’s fastest weather forecasting supercomputer. When it’s complete, the Met Office’s new supercomputer will clock in at 16 petaflops — one of the fastest supercomputers in the world, and more than twice as powerful as the next-fastest weather forecasting computer (which, somewhat fortuitously, is being built by the Germans).

The UK’s Met Office (short for meteorological office), which was founded in 1854, is one of the world’s oldest and best forecasting agencies. In concert with the world’s first submarine telegraph cables — which were also laid by the Brits — the Met Office played a key role in the construction and constancy of the British Empire. Obviously the last 100 years or so have seen the Met Office become slightly less pivotal in global governance, but it still tries to be one of the world’s top weather forecasters. The Met Office was one of the earliest users of digital computers, and then later, as it became possible to model the entirety of Earth in RAM, supercomputers as well.

The Met Office’s new supercomputer — an XC40 system built by Cray — will have a total capacity of 16 petaflops (16 quadrillion calculations per second) when it’s completed in 2017. We don’t know the exact design of the system, except that it will have a total of 480,000 CPU cores — which, we believe, equates to 32,000 15-core Intel Xeon E5 chips. There’s no word on RAM or anything like that — though, amusingly enough, the Met Office does give the supercomputer’s completed weight (140 tonnes, or 11 double-decker London buses). Somewhat interestingly for a supercomputer of this scale, the XC40 is an air-cooled design, rather than water-cooled.

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The new system — which will cost £96 million, or $156 million — will be 13 times faster than the Met Office’s current weather forecasting machine (which was built by IBM), and more than twice as fast as the Hornet weather forecasting supercomputer currently being built in Germany. The improved forecasts — better flood warnings, more accurate hurricane prediction, etc. — will be worth around $2 billion in socio-economic benefits (not a bad trade-off!) The new supercomputer will also let meteorologists and climate scientists keep a closer eye on global climate change, too.

The UK’s science minister, Greg Clark, had some suitably British things to say about the Met Office’s new computer. “It will be one of the best high-performance computers in the world … It makes us world leaders not only in talking about the weather, but forecasting it too.” Here he’s referring to the fact that, after royal babies, the weather is the gloomy glue that binds British society together.

At 16 petaflops the Met Office’s new computer will be powerful, but certainly not the fastest system in the world. As it stands, China’s Tianhe-2, Oak Ride’s Titan, and Lawrence Livermore’s Sequoia all currently have peak capacity above 16 teraflops. By 2017, I wouldn’t be surprised if the world’s top supercomputers are at 100 petaflops or more. But hey, for a system that’s dedicated to forecasting the weather — and not simulating thermonuclear devices, fusion power, or folding proteins — 16 petaflops is still pretty impressive.

Personally, if the Met Office’s new supercomputer means I have slightly less drizzle in my life, I’ll consider it a worthwhile use of my taxes.

Now read: The history of supercomputers