Greenie, No Compute

A $45 million supercomputer that’s supposed to help monitor England’s CO2 emissions will itself create a massive “carbon footprint.”

In an embarrassing head-on collision with irony, officials at the UK’s Met (i.e. the Brit’s National Weather Service) acknowledged that their new “environmental” supercomputer is in fact a superpolluter.

From the Times UK:

When it came to buying a new supercomputer, the Met Office decided not to heed its own warnings. The ironic problem was that it needed the extra computing power to improve the accuracy of its own climate predictions as well as its short-term weather forecasting. The machine will also improve its ability to predict extreme events such as fierce localised storms, cloudbursts and so on.

The new superpolluter … err, computer … will emit 14,400 tons of CO2 a year, which is equivalent to the CO2 emitted by 2,400 homes.

Hmmmm … that sounds more like a carbon “Bigfoot” print to us.

“We recognize that running such massive computers consumes huge amounts of power and that our actions in weather and climate prediction, like all our actions, have an impact on the environment,” one agency official said. “We will be taking actions to minimize this impact.”

Really?

Because while agency officials were oohing and ahhing about the new machine’s capabilities, they were also forced to admit that their current supercomputer – which is 30 times slower than the new machine – emits 10,000 tons of C02 each year.

When reached for comment by FITS, the old supercomputer quickly darted for the exits screaming “no disassemble No. 5!”