Computation Centre : Marine Data Infrastructure for data storage, processing and computation

Intensive scientific computation is at the heart of many modern oceanography projects. The Computation Centre is an essential tool for researchers in many fields.

Uses

Operational oceanography is generally based on modelling techniques that, associated with high computational capacity, have fields of applications that are constantly growing: modelling ocean circulation at different scales, coupled modelling (e.g. hydrodynamics and chemistry), models of contaminant dispersal in coastal areas, etc.

In other cases, the sheer quantity of data to process requires large computational capacities, e.g. in marine or coastal geomatics, when high-resolution satellite data are included. The emerging field of marine bioinformatics also requires large computational capacities for screening gene sequences. In addition, marine engineering, with its fluid mechanics and structural computations, also requires large computational power.

Operations and developments

The Caparmor III computer is an Altix ICE 8200 EX from SGI whose theoretical power is 27 teraFLOPs.

The Datarmor project aims to improve data storage, computation and processing by integrating technical “big data” architecture to handle ever-increasing volumes of data produced by observation systems. Observation systems have gradually transitioned from discrete observations to global and/or automated systems that produce immense volumes of data from which scientists must find or summarise, by data processing, the relevant data that interests them.

This project involves a wide partnership: IFREMER, SHOM, IUEM/UBO, CNRS, ENSTA Bretagne, French Naval Academy, IRD and the Pôle Mer Bretagne Atlantique economic development cluster.