JASMIN Upgrade to Support Large Data Sets

A major upgrade to the UK’s leading environmental science supercomputer will support the global analysis of the next generation of climate models and provide a venue for UK academia and industry to exploit Earth observation data.

Doubling the available storage to the supercomputer to more than 44 Petabytes, (equivalent to over 10 billion photos), it will also add around 40% to the processing capability, with 11,500 cores on 600 nodes, similar to adding the power of several thousand high-end laptops.

Currently supporting over 160 science projects ranging from earthquake detection and oceanography to air pollution and climate science, the 1700 registered users of JASMIN can process and analyse big datasets simultaneously and in very little time. RAL Space's Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA), part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council (STFC), jointly manages JASMIN.

Dr Victoria Bennett, Head of CEDA, said “We are excited to be expanding JASMIN to manage the increasingly large datasets, from satellites, climate models and other sources. For example the current Sentinel Earth observation satellites alone are producing 10 Terabytes of data every day and this will grow as more are launched as part of the European Commission's Copernicus programme. This upgrade will allow us to build on the successes we've already seen in enabling our users in the science community to efficiently process and analyse these massive datasets.”

Funded with a multi-million pound investment from the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), the upgraded system will also continue to provide the “UK environmental data commons” - an online collaborative space bringing together data, services and expertise - underpinning much of academic environmental science. Completion is expected by the end of 2018.