Case Study: Columbia University accelerates climate science research with Google for Education

Columbia University - Customer Case Study

Columbia University, a leading research institution, faced a growing climate science data challenge as researchers struggled to analyze massive, complex Earth system modeling datasets fast enough to support iterative scientific discovery. The university’s Pangeo initiative needed a scalable, cost-effective way to store and process data, and it turned to Google for Education’s Google Cloud Platform, including Cloud Storage and Kubernetes, to support the effort.

Google for Education helped Columbia University deploy Pangeo on Google Cloud Platform, with Google Kubernetes Engine enabling managed, parallel computation through open-source tools like Jupyter Notebook, Xarray, and Dask. The prototype launched quickly using GCP credits, and early results included hundreds of users, 10,000 hours of compute, and 100 terabytes of stored data, while Google’s renewable energy matching helped make the platform’s net carbon emissions zero.

Columbia University

Ryan Abernathey

Assistant Professor