Weathering the Flood of Big Data in Climate ResearchAn extreme weather researcher recently used the speed and collaborative power of ESnet to gather massive climate datasets from 21 different sites around the world to look at how extreme weather is likely to change in the future, in frequency and intensity. He estimated it would take more than two and a half years, using a desktop computer and commercial network speed to download the datasets. He turned to ESnet for help. It took three months of work by the ESnet staff to transfer the data – accessing each site, solving problems, overseeing the process one file at a time. Next, ESnet staff sent the data to Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) where data were standardized and cleaned in approximately 15 days. The data were transferred to the supercomputer at Argonne Leadership Computing Facility using the 100 Gbps speed of the ESnet network – in only two days. The ESnet facilities and staff had drawn data from far-flung locations, amassing data so that the weather researcher obtained a valuable dataset, organized and ready for analysis in a fraction of the time it would have otherwise taken. http://www.es.net/news-and-publications/esnet-news/2014/weathering-the-flood-of-big-data-in-climate-research/