The Republic of Korea Air Force (ROKAF) has purchased and begun operating a high performance computing (HPC) solution, the SGI Altix ICE 8400 system, to enhance long-term weather forecasts for the country’s defence forces.

The Altix ICE 8400 system consists of more than 1,700 processor cores built with Intel Xeon processors 5600 series, and 800 TB of SGI InfiniteStorage and Spectra Logic tape storage.

The system will be used for numerical weather forecasting and is designed to achieve twice the performance of the previous solution and to produce accurate long-term forecasts.

SGI Asia Pacific managing director and vice president Philip Chua said the solution will accelerate low altitude and high altitude weather forecasting for the ROKAF.