Or... the hackers half way across the globe activate the kill switch and the swarm of boats turns into sitting ducks :D

Well, congrats to NOAA for the milestone...but isn't a peta-scale system a thing of the past for something as computationally intensive and critical as weather prediction? The prediction model seems to have no scalability issues: "The Hrrr model produces output from the model every 15 minutes versus the previous hourly rate,..", meaning 4x speedup for a 4x upgrade in peak performance. Why didn't NOAA go for a peta-scale system straightaway?

The upgraded systems are already placed way down the list of world's fastest 500: http://top500.org/system/17783....

The article says a peta-scale system is under way but I'm afraid by the time it starts ringing its bells, we'll all have entered exa-scale. Is NOAA always going to be catching up?