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German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) facilitates world-changing research
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Product Research & Development
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is a national facility based in Hamburg, Germany. The organization provides high-performance computing and storage resources to scientists examining the Earth’s climate system, addressing global climate change and its regional effects. With an estimated annual growth rate of 75 PB over the next five years, DKRZ needed to upgrade to a more powerful storage solution. Michael Böttinger, Group Head of Visualization and Public Relations at DKRZ, says: “Storing and retrieving data efficiently is absolutely essential for our HPC systems to always deliver the best performance for scientists. To continue providing world-class high-performance computing systems, we needed an equally world-class data archiving system.”
About The Customer
The German Climate Computing Center (DKRZ) is a national facility based in Hamburg, Germany. The organization provides high-performance computing and storage resources to scientists examining the Earth’s climate system, addressing global climate change and its regional effects. DKRZ is open to scientists specializing in climate and Earth system modeling, and provides users with access to a comprehensive high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure, specifically customized for complex numerical models of the climate system. Every year, more than 6,000 scientists from around the world access data stored at DKRZ, supporting research projects to deepen their understanding of climate change processes and effects.
The Solution
DKRZ evaluated several different storage solutions before selecting an ultra-scalable and highly reliable hierarchical storage management and data archiving solution based on the High Performance Storage System, a result of over a decade of collaboration among US Department of Energy laboratories and IBM. IBM offered the most attractive and functional package, and has proven that it can deliver leading technology and provide access to highly competent specialists, including on-site assistance to deploy and operate a robust high-performance solution. DKRZ partnered with IBM Global Technology Services to implement the High Performance Storage Solution and integrate it into the new HPC environment on-site in the DKRZ data center. High Performance Storage System is designed to manage and access hundreds of petabytes of data at high data rates. The IBM solution controls the end-to-end data lifecycle, aggregating small files and moving inactive data to tape and automatically retrieving it when it is used. This enables DKRZ to store huge volumes of experiment data securely and efficiently, while making it quickly and easily accessible to scientists as needed.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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