Cray Inc. announced that the first Cray Shasta™ supercomputing system for operational weather forecasting and meteorology will be acquired by the Air Force Life Cycle Management Center in partnership with Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The powerful high-performance computing capabilities of the new system, named HPC11, will enable higher fidelity weather forecasts for U.S. Air Force and Army operations worldwide. The contract is valued at $25 million. Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has a history of deploying the world’s most powerful supercomputers and through this partnership, will provide supercomputing-as-a-service on the HPC11 Shasta system to the Air Force 557th Weather Wing. The 557th Weather Wing develops and provides comprehensive terrestrial and space weather information to the U.S. Air Force and Army. The new system will feature the revolutionary Cray Slingshot™ interconnect, with features to better support time-critical numerical weather prediction workloads, and will enhance the Air Force’s capabilities to create improved weather forecasts and weather threat assessments so that Air Force missions can be carried out more effectively. HPC11 will be ORNL’s first Cray Shasta system, as well as the first supercomputing system with 2nd Gen AMD EPYC™ processors for use in operational weather forecasting. HPC11 will join the 85% bastion of weather centers that rely on Cray, and will feature eight Shasta cabinets in a dual-hall configuration.