University of Victoria Climate Modelling Laboratory: Supercomputing for Climate Science in the Big Data era

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The University of Victoria Climate Modelling Laboratory is one of the most important centres for climate modelling in Canada. Our Lab consists of three professors, fifteen trainees, and we have close relationships with scientists from the Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis. We work on all aspects of climatology: the past, present and future, from local to global scales. ******Our work requires a lot of computer resources. We are involved in development of cutting edge climate models, which need to be tested quickly as we are developing them, so we need uninterrupted access to lots of processing cores. Many of the datasets that we use are huge (least tens of terabytes each - so called "big data"), so we need lots of space to store them and sufficiently powerful computers to analyze these quickly. ******Our application is for a small supercomputer to support all of the work in the Lab, replacing various computers which are at the end of their lives and/or not sufficient for our current and future research needs. Having dedicated local computing facilities is essential for us to work efficiently and work on the most important topics, irrespective of computing requirements, and is complementary to our use of national (Compute Canada) facilities. ******This computer will enable us to make cutting edge contributions to climate science nationally and internationally, and to train the next generation of Canadian climate scientists in using high-performance computing, model development, and data analysis in the big data era. As Canada is on the frontline of climate change, this ability to increase our knowledge and personnel base will be critical in understanding the impacts on our environment and society in the coming decades, and guiding our adaptations to climate change.