The CSC data center in Kajaani, Finland, will host a 30-petabyte data lake for the European Meteorological Satellite Agency EUMETSAT and the Destination Earth initiative. The DestinE data lake will be supplied by cloud solutions company CloudFerro. CSC said the data lake has about 30 rack cabinets, each rack the size of a tall refrigerator.
The distributed data lake has an edge-computing footprint (data bridge) to allow near data processing of digital twin data generated by the LUMI supercomputer, also housed at CSC. Ranked no. 3 on the TOP500 list of the world’s most powerful HPC systems, LUMI is a 309-petaFLOPS HPE Cray EX system powered by AMD CPUs and GPUs.
CSC said the data lake is designed for distributed big data workflows, providing “researchers with seamless access to data from different sources, such as satellites and instruments, and the data produced by the digital twins of the Destination Earth initiative. The installation is scheduled start in spring and will begin operations in June.
Destination Earth is an initiative of the European Commission within the Digital Europe Programme to develop high-precision digital models. The digital twins will allow modelling of climate change, local impacts of climate change and extreme weather events and provide data to support decision-making.
“The DestinE Data Lake will enable researchers using digital twins to access the large amounts of data they need and run smooth computations on the LUMI supercomputer,” said Jukka-Pekka Partanen, director of the Kajaani Datacenter Program at CSC. “We want to increase the number of European research projects and international collaboration in our ecosystem, expand our ecosystem and develop our competence. This project offers excellent opportunities for that.”
LUMI supercomputer
Three organizations will implement the Destination Earth initiative: the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the European Space Agency (ESA), and the European Organisation for the Exploitation of Meteorological Satellites (EUMETSAT).
“Within the overall context of Destination Earth and also with regards to the DestinE data lake, the EuroHPC JU sites like LUMI play a fundamental role,” said Lothar Wolf, Destination Earth programme manager at EUMETSAT. “We consider their expertise and infrastructure contribution as essential and are looking forward to a lasting relationship with us and also vis a vis our industrial prime CloudFerro.”
