Major investment triples capacity for analysing environmental data

Scientists will soon have access to triple the processing power for analysing environmental data. A £5.7 million investment for expanding the parallel compute cluster, called LOTUS  , on JASMIN has been secured. The improved infrastructure allows much greater volume of parallel computing tasks - where multiple streams of data analysis tasks are undertaken at the same time - whilst reducing the time that users have to wait for their analysis to complete. Capacity will be tripled and will be available to users from Summer 2024.

JASMIN is a globally-unique data analysis facility  - part of UKRI’s digital research infrastructure  . It provides storage and compute facilities to enable data-intensive environmental science. Over 1500 users are currently supported exploring topics ranging from climate change and oceanography to air pollution, earthquake deformation and analysis of wildlife populations. This investment is from the UKRI Digital Research Infrastructure funding stream, with the work commissioned by NERC and delivered by STFC as part of the on-going cross-council collaboration on JASMIN to serve the environmental science community.

Centred more around storage and data analysis than a “traditional” supercomputer, JASMIN provides flexibility for a wide range of data-intensive analysis workflows. The renewal and expansion of the LOTUS parallel compute cluster will enable users to make use of ~55,000 compute cores - more than tripling the current capacity. This will provide better performance, reduce task queuing time, and improve the ability to meet the wide range of user requirements.

Professor David Stevens, University of East Anglia, Chair of NERC’s High Performance Computing Steering Committee said ‘JASMIN is a critical resource for UK environmental research – enabling ground-breaking research that otherwise would not be possible. This expansion, as a result of the ongoing NERC-STFC collaboration, will significantly enhance its capability for the community.’

This upgrade complements a range of other JASMIN services that enable environmental research, including but not limited to;

• a GPU cluster for AI workflows 
• interactive analysis tools  such as a Notebook service
• direct access to the long-term CEDA archive  which hosts over 20PB of atmospheric and earth observation data

Our mission, aligned with UKRI strategy, is to ensure our systems work in the most environmentally sustainable way. Sustainability formed a key criteria in the procurement process for this upgrade. There will be an improved performance per watt compared to the existing LOTUS hardware, but as capacity has increased, it is likely energy consumption will too.

The team are actively researching and implementing ways to improve sustainability e.g. reducing and removing hardware/data that is not being used, and implementing measures to operate the system in the most efficient way. Funding to look at practical next steps for net zero and sustainability has been secured - building upon the findings of the UKRI Net Zero Digital Research Infrastructure Scoping Project  . An example is to establish a better process for extracting carbon metrics for each individual user or science project.

Additional Information  

JASMIN is operated and supported by a small but innovative team with expertise in systems administration, computer science, research software engineering and environmental informatics.

JASMIN is designed, integrated and operated by the Science & Technology Facilities Council (STFC) on behalf of the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC)  . Architectured jointly between STFC’s Scientific Computing  and RAL Space  Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA).

CEDA provides services, including JASMIN, on behalf of NERC via the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS)  and the National Centre for Earth Observation (NCEO)  .

Contact  

For more information, contact Poppy Townsend: support@ceda.ac.uk