Case Study: University of South Carolina speeds climate change research with Google Cloud

By optimizing their workflow on the cloud, the University of South Carolina advances research into climate change

The University of South Carolina’s Research Computing team worked with Google for Education to help the Molecular Microbial Biology Lab tackle a major metagenomics data backlog. Their climate-change research was generating tens of terabytes of data per sample and hundreds of terabytes of compute, making analysis on local systems far too slow and expensive.

Using Google Cloud Platform and Compute Engine, Google for Education helped USC redesign the workflow in the cloud, add scalable storage, and automate scheduling with Slurm. The result was dramatic: processing that took three months on a local cluster was reduced to 16.5 hours on Google Cloud, and a year’s backlog that could have taken two years locally can now be completed in about three days, while also improving reproducibility and cost efficiency.

University of South Carolina

Paul Sagona

Interim Executive Director