Public lecture by Richard Lawrence, IT-Fellow - Supercomputing, Met Office

The Met Office has signed a multimillion-pound agreement with Microsoft to provide a world-leading supercomputing capability that will take weather and climate forecasting to the next level.

In his talk, Richard will explain how the government was convinced to invest a significant amount of money in a world changing IT upgrade.

• Understand the workings of the Met Office and how it makes use of Supercomputers
  
• Learn how government spent £1bn on supercomputing
  
• Gain insight into how you move 1 petabyte of data a day
  

Short biography

Specialising in supercomputing architecture, Richard is accountable for the technical design, implementation, and future direction of one of the world’s largest supercomputers dedicated to weather and climate research.

As the programme architect for the Met Office’s Supercomputer 2020+ programme, he led the work on the Data Centre, Connectivity and Scientific Compute Environment packages and oversaw the requirement capture and design of the Active Data Archive expected to handle 1PB of data a day with a capacity of ~4 Exabytes.

Richard holds a MEng in Software Engineering at Aberystwyth University and is a Chartered Engineer and Chartered IT Professional.