Weather forecasts for the Beijing Olympic Games will be performed using an IBM supercomputer that can provide hourly forecasts for each square kilometer, making it easier to plan for disruptions to specific events.

The large-scale forecasts made by China’s national weather service are not detailed enough for next year’s Olympic Games, so the Beijing Meteorological Bureau has bought an IBM System p575. It’s the same type of computer used by the U.S. National Weather Service and about 35 other weather-forecasting sites around the world, says David Blaskovich, IBM’s Deep Computing weather specialist, who is based in Monterey, Calif.

Beijing’s 80-node p575 can deliver performance of 9.8 teraflops, or 9.8 trillion operations per second. It will let atmospheric scientists develop algorithms to express the dynamics of the atmosphere, and has enough computational horsepower and reliability to deliver the constant weather updates required during the Olympics, he says.

China’s national weather service “makes courser resolution forecasts for the entire country,” Blaskovich explains. “The Beijing Meterological Bureau, in support of the Olympics, will make regional scale forecasts that are much higher resolution over the Olympics and all of the venues.”