Quote:

---

The Met Office has caused a storm of controversy after it was revealed their £30million supercomputer designed to predict climate change is one of Britain's worst polluters.

The massive machine - the UK's most powerful computer with a whopping 15 million megabytes of memory - was installed in the Met Office's headquarters in Exeter, Devon.

It is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second to feed data to 400 scientists and uses 1.2 megawatts of energy to run - enough to power more than 1,000 homes.

The Met Office's HQ has now been named as one of the worst buildings in Britain for pollution - responsible for more than 12,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide a year.

It says 75 per cent of its carbon footprint is produced by the super computer meaning the machine is officially one of the country's least green machines.

The supercomputer predicted a BBQ summer, which didn't materialise. Here Max Preston, 7, paddles around flooded tents in the Lake District.

The supercomputer - more powerful than 100,000 standard PCs - was installed in the Met Office's new £80 million headquarters in May.

It processes information from satellite images and was hailed as capable of predicting disastrous weather events that were previously unforeseeable such as the infamous hurricane of 1987.

The IBM machine has a peak performance of 1 'Petaflop' - 1,000 billion calculations per second - which it will not reach until 2011.

www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1209430/Weather-supercomputer-
used-predict-climate-change-Britains-worst-polluters.html

---