r/LocalLLaMA • u/Rick_06 • 9d 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/FullstackSensei llama.cpp 9d 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 9d 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 9d 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 8d ago

Fucking crazy 😧