In a modern five-story building in the center of Hamburg, Germany, technicians are preparing to install several new “racks” — gray metal casings that hold computing hardware — alongside the scores that already line the narrow, dimly lit corridors of the German Climate Computing Center, or DKRZ, one of the world’s largest repositories for climate simulation data. The new equipment will add about 5 petabytes of storage capacity to the 254 petabytes of data already stored here. One petabyte of data is equivalent to the storage space needed for roughly 200 million high-resolution images.
Under normal circumstances, the DKRZ’s mission is to provide computing power and storage to the German climate science community. But these new racks will serve a different and highly sensitive purpose: They will store backup versions of climate simulations from the other side of the Atlantic. The operation aims to ensure that essential work performed by U.S. scientists for the next major U.N. climate assessment, due in 2029, cannot be meddled with or compromised by the administration of ... Read more
