German climate researchers prepare for rising seas of data
It’s nice to have the latest kit, but a supercomputer upgrade is about to bring the German Climate Computing Center, DKRZ, a big problem: a shortage of space.Not space for the computer itself, but for the data it generates.DKRZ runs climate models on its supercomputer, projecting how our planet’s weather will evolve over decades or even, in some cases, hundreds of millennia, from the last ice age and into the future.All those models generate huge volumes of data—40 petabytes of so far—that DKRZ archives for future reference, allowing researchers to analyze the models’ output in different ways. The center also offers to store the output from climate models run by other supercomputing centers, forming a world climate studies archive drawn on by researchers around the world.To read this article in full or to leave a comment, please click here