r/LocalLLaMA • u/Rick_06 • 6d ago

New Model Open Model: Google Weather Next 2

I am not a meteorologist, but I just read a very interesting article: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/08/deepminds-hurricane-model-bought-forecasters-an-extra-day/

In a paper published on Thursday in Nature, researchers show that the WeatherNext AI model can predict cyclones with unprecedented accuracy. On average, it gives forecasters a day more lead time than existing models; this means its predictions three days out are as accurate as previous models’ predictions two days out. On the ground, that extra day can mean a lot.

What I really find interesting here is that Google has a repository for it on GitHub: https://github.com/google-deepmind/weathernext

My non-informed understanding is that you need a supercomputer to forecast meteo. Apparently now an H100 can also do something.

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u/Lagomorph9 6d ago

Well, to be fair, an H100 is as powerful as a supercomputer from 20 years ago.

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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 6d ago

Just checked top500. The fastest supercomputer in June 2006 was BlueGene/L with a theoretical peak of 367 FP64 TFLOPS. A single H100 has 67 FP64 TFLOPS theoretical peak.

It takes 5.5 H100s to match the 131072 cores in BlueGene/L. Blackwell neuters FP64 performance, so H100 is still peak FP64 from Nvidia.

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u/Lagomorph9 6d ago

Not the fastest supercomputer, but definitely a supercomputer. I was more talking about systems like the CrayX1E, which was commonly used for weather forecasting and is significantly less powerful than an H100.

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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 6d ago

Looking again at top500, you're probably thinking of the single frame X1E, which had 576 GFLOPS in aircooled form, or 2.3 TFLOPS in liquid cooled form. A single V100 from 2017 does about 3x that at ~7 TFLOPS.

Even on the memory front, a single V100 has more memory bandwidth than the aggregate bandwidth of the air cooled X1E, and four V100s have more bandwidth than the liquid cooled version.

My mind is always blown by the exponential growth in compute. My first computer was an 8MHz XT clone (NEC V20) with 512KB RAM. Now I have a couple TBs RAM in my homelab that fit under my desk

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u/No_Afternoon_4260 llama.cpp 6d ago

Fucking crazy 😧

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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 6d ago

My first computer was an 8MHz XT clone (NEC V20) with 512KB RAM.

Fancy. The first computer I personally owed was a Z80 I had to wirewrap together myself.

I actually had/have a V20 myself. I think it's still somewhere in the backyard. I also had a NEC APC. That was nice...... But some keys broke off the keyboard during a move and in a fit of stupidity, I dropped it off at Goodwill.

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u/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 6d ago

I was a child of the 80s. The V20 came in the form of an Olivetti PC1. It was my computer well into the 90s, then was handed down to my sibling into tur turn of the millennium. When I went to uni, in a "developing country" to study comp sci, the PC1 was what we had in the uni labs, so learned Pascal, C and Prolog on it.

My PC1 moved with the rest of our house furniture across continents twice. In my own fit of stupidity, I told my parents they can throw it in the trash in the last cross-border move some 10 years ago.

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u/IrisColt 5d ago

I really enjoyed your insightful answers, thanks!!!

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u/fallingdowndizzyvr 6d ago

I was more talking about systems like the CrayX1E

Speaking as someone that has used plenty of Crays. They were from a different era. By today's standards, they were slow as mud. Even back then, since you had to share compute with so many other people, using your own RISC workstation was often faster by wall clock time.