The UK Met Office has announced a £97 million investment in a new Cray XC40TM supercomputer

The UK's obsession with the weather has just been stepped up a gear. The Met Office has announced that it will begin using a new supercomputer enabling highly detailed forecasts. The Cray XC40TM will cost £97 million (US$156 million) and is aimed at making the UK a world leader in weather and climate science.

The Met Office is the UK's public weather and climate research agency. The data it produces is made available for use by other organizations and has previously been employed for showing temperature records in Google Earth and and by Micasa Lab's indoor cloud-making machine. This most recent investment will help to improve the volume and accuracy of the data produced.


The Cray XC40TM is one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. It has 480,000 cores, 2 million gigabytes of memory and can store up to 17 million gigabytes of data. At its peak, it is able to make 16,000 trillion calculations per second.

The system is a significant upgrade from the current IBM Power 775, which has a memory of 80,000 gigabytes, can store up to 2 million gigabytes and can make 1,200 trillion calculations per second.

The computer will enable hourly forecasting with a much higher level of weather detail for precise geographic areas and the ability to create much higher resolution weather modeling for localized areas. The Met Office says that that it will be possible to create models for areas down to a resolution of 300 m (984 ft), allowing it to effectively predict differences in weather conditions between city blocks or even individual streets. It will also be possible to better predict weather over longer periods, allowing for better preparation against developing climate trends such as flooding, droughts and heatwaves.

According to the Met Office, this could lead to £2 billion of socio-economic benefits to the UK, allowing airports to operate at a greater level of efficiency, properties to be better protected from flooding and winter infrastructure to be better planned. Planning for renewable energy infrastructure and climate change research will also benefit.


The Cray XC40TM will be located partly at the Met Office HQ in Exeter and partly at a purpose-designed building at the nearby Exeter Science Park (pending planning permission). It will become semi-operational in September 2015 and will reach full capacity in 2017. Learn more »

The LG 31MU97 monitor has DCI 4K resolution of 4096 x 2160, which is a digital cinema standard

UHD 4K computer monitors (with a resolution of 3840 x 2160, like 4K TVs) have only started being released relatively recently. Already, though, manufacturers are offering monitors with higher specs still. LG's new 31MU97 has a DCI 4K resolution of 4096 x 2160, a standard used for digital cinema.

The 4K market has moved on apace since we questioned whether its time had come back in February. This year has seen a wealth of devices released, despite there still not being a great deal of content available to view on them. The 31MU97, however, is not so much for people consuming 4K content, as it is for those who work with it. The monitor is aimed squarely at visual creatives, such as photographers, video editors and graphic artists.

In addition to its DCI 4K resolution, the 31MU97 supports 10-bit color and over 99.5 percent of the Adobe RGB color space, designed by Adobe to recreate the CMYK color printer palette. It also covers 97 percent of the DCI-P3 color space, the standard for digital cinema projectors and digital cameras.

The monitor can be calibrated to several different color modes depending on the needs of the users, and can even display two different color modes at once for comparisons of work on-screen under different conditions.

Amongst the other features of the 31MU97 are the ability for video editors to edit 4K content in Digital Cinema 4K without image scaling. LG’s True Color Pro software allows users to calibrate the screen to their requirements.

The LG 31MU97 will be available globally from this week.

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HP's new all-in-one Sprout PC

HP has revealed a new all-in-one computer named Sprout which pushes the everything-you-need-in-one-place envelope to both vertical and horizontal workspaces. Users are able to grab an icon or digital object on the computer's touchscreen display and drag it down to a projected second screen on a touch-enabled pad below for precision tweaking with fingers or a stylus. Overhead scanning technology can digitize physical objects too, which the user can manipulate and move between both display areas.

Sitting above Sprout's 23-inch LED backlit touchscreen HD display is a combined four camera sensor system (which includes Intel's RealSense 3D camera and a 14.6 MP camera), a DLP projector and LED desk lamp known as the Illuminator. This unit points down towards a 20-inch, 20-point capacitive touch mat that has the look of a rather large mouse pad and the HP Workspace platform brings the dual display 3D workspace to life, effectively giving users two touchscreens to work with.


The overhead scanning technology can create 3D-like images of objects placed on the mat, which then appear on the vertical display. These digital clones can be flicked down to the mat onto a work area thrown down from above by the projection unit. The scanned image can be cropped, resized, moved around and otherwise interfered with, text can be added using a virtual keyboard and then the whole shebang returned to the main screen for fine tuning, saving or sending on. Collaborative tools allow operators in multiple locations to simultaneously manipulate the same digital content.

Chugging away behind the impressive-looking blended reality user interface is a high end all-in-one Windows 8.1 PC powered by a 4th gen Intel Core i7-4790S processor with integrated HD4600 graphics and Nvidia GeForce DT 745A GPU (with 2 GB of dedicated video memory). 8 GB of 1600 MHz DDR3 RAM can be expanded to 16 GB, and there's 1 TB of SSD/HDD hybrid storage built in. The AIO also features integrated speakers with DTS Sound+, two digital microphones and a 720p webcam out front.

Connectivity comes in the shape of 802.11a/b/g/n/ac dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet, two USB 3.0 and two USB 2.0 ports (including one that's capable of charging mobile devices), HDMI and a mini PCIe expansion slot.

The company has also launched an application store to support the new immersive computing platform called the Sprout Marketplace, which currently includes uniquely-designed Windows-based apps such as the Martha Stewart CraftStudio, DreamWorks Animation Story Producer, Crayola's Draw & Sing and GestureWorks Gameplay as well as HP's own Create, Collaborate and Capture software.

The HP Spout is set for release on November 9, but is up for pre-order now for US$1,900.


You can see potential applications for the technology in the video below, including scanning a real world building block and adding the digitized version to a child's photo, creating a try before you buy remote sales experience by adding virtual trinkets to the image of a customer and making the most of extra screen real estate to produce popping presentations.

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Chisel allows small computational errors to be made, in the name of saving power 

You may have heard the expression, "Work smarter, not harder." When applied to humans, it means (partially) that we should do our best work on the tasks that are the most important, instead of wasting time and effort by going all out on every task. Well, that principle is now also being applied to computers. Using MIT's new Chisel system, computers are saving power by delegating less-critical tasks to less-dependable lower-energy hardware. This means mistakes may be made on those tasks, but that's OK.

Chisel is intended to be used mainly by programmers working on fairly high-end, complex projects.

The software scans programs for individual functions that require a lot of processing power. It then presents these to the programmer, and has them indicate how important it is that each one be executed as accurately as possible. Before they commit, however, users can choose the margin of error that they will tolerate for a given task, plus they can see a preview of how the function will work at that setting.

Tasks that are given a high priority are then processed using the computer's most dependable, energy-gobbling hardware. Not-so-important tasks, however, go to the lower-end circuits. An example of such a "some-mistakes-allowed" task would be the rendering of images, where one or two out-of-place pixels simply wouldn't be that big of a deal.

In simulations, the use of Chisel was found to result in energy savings ranging from 9 to 19 percent. The software is based on a previously-developed programming language known as Rely, in which users enter specific code when writing programs, to manually indicate which tasks are more error-tolerant.

Scientists at Rice University are also exploring the concept of putting up with minor errors in order to save energy, with an "inexact" chip which they claim is at least 15 times more efficient than current technology in terms of speed, energy consumption and size – and that's good enough to get lower-priority jobs done without too many mistakes. Learn more »