When the UK’s national weather forecaster, the Met Office, announced its next supercomputer purchase would actually be a cloud subscription, that was controversial: it recently settled out of court with its previous IT supplier after claims the decision was unfair. What it chose was a traditional supercomputer from a non-traditional supplier: selecting four Cray EX systems on Azure to “spend less time buying supercomputers and more time utilizing them” as Met Office IT Fellow Richard Lawrence phrased it.
