IBMHPC in the news

The recent press blitz ahead of the new supercomputers trials has obviously paid off. Here are a few choice bits from the Mail's coverage:

The Met Office unveiled Britain's most powerful super computer today, which is capable of 1,000 billion calculations every second.

I'm not sure where this number comes from, but a TFLOP is supposed to be 10¹², so the flop count is out by at least two orders of magnitude.

It was switched on this week but will take a staggering two MONTHS to fully boot-up. At peak performance it will perform 1,000 billion calculations per second, but this will not be reached until 2011.

Two months to boot up!?! I think someone has confused the start of operational running, i.e. getting the forecast suite running and producing products, with starting the OS.

The Met Office computer - which has no name - has overtaken the previous most powerful computer in Britain at Edinburgh University.

I think ECMWF would dispute this given that they've got (or are in the process of getting) a pair of machines each with around two hundred p575s, but maybe they haven't yet got round to putting out a press release about it...