Verne Global says that Centro Epson Meteo – Expert Meteo, one of Europe’s most innovative meteorological forecasting organisations, will be utilising its HPC optimised bare-metal infrastructure solution, hpcDIRECT, to accelerate and improve the accuracy of its forecasting and data analytics capabilities.
Centro Epson Meteo provides bespoke forecasting and data simulation solutions to organisations operating in the agriculture, aviation, maritime, media, insurance, and energy industries. In 2017, when its in-house servers were nearing end-of-life, the Centro Epson Meteo team began to explore alternative solutions to improve the speed and performance of increasingly compute-intensive applications while at the same time meet growing demand for its services. With concerns around the reliability of the local power grid in Milan, and with the rising cost of hosting applications in-house, the team decided to partner with a specialist HPC infrastructure solution provider.
Centro Epson Meteo first met with the Verne Global team at Meteorological Technology World Expo in 2016 and went on to choose Verne Global following a rigorous trial period when it moved live operational models to the data center campus in Iceland. During the trial, and with the help of Verne Global’s team of HPC specialists, Centro Epson Meteo halved the amount of time taken to process computer models. This, together with the ability to run more simulations at a higher resolution, delivering more detailed results, was a major determining factor in the company’s decision to migrate all of its HPC workloads to Verne Global.
“The trial results were immediate and impressive. Not only did Verne Global’s infrastructure provide us with the compute power required to increase the throughput of our remote climatic visualisations and weather simulations, its team gave us invaluable advice on how to optimise our processes in order to extract the maximum performance from our applications,” said Alessandro Perotto, project manager at Centro Epson Meteo – Expert Meteo. “As we migrate all of our workloads to Verne Global’s campus, we are confident that our customers will benefit from more detailed, accurate forecasts.”
hpcDIRECT provides a TrueHPC platform, comprising dedicated bare-metal servers in a highly optimised environment, supported by a team of HPC specialists. With this deployment, Centro Epson Meteo will utilise HPC cores based on the latest Intel® Xeon® Gold Skylake Gold architecture, with specialist DevOps support for the lifetime of the project.
“Verne Global provides us with the peace of mind that we have our own dedicated infrastructure that’s optimised to meet our specific needs and backed-up by a team of real HPC experts, together with the flexibility and scalability that’s usually only associated with cloud-based services,” continued Perotto. “What’s more, its precision-engineered data center appealed to us as scientists – it felt like the right place to house our mission-critical applications and the trial results proved our hypothesis. Of course, as climate change researchers, Verne Global’s access to 100 percent renewable energy was another vital factor in our decision.”
“The Centro Epson Meteo team undertakes truly pioneering work. Not only does it provide empirical data about climate change and extreme weather phenomena, this information underpins an increasing number of machine learning deployments, which should improve the accuracy of future meteorological predictions,” said Tate Cantrell, Chief Technology Officer at Verne Global. “We are delighted to play a part in this vital research.”
