Case Study: The Scottish Association for Marine Science achieves coral larvae simulation speedups with Google for Education

Marine research organizations sponsor innovative model to track coral larvae movements

The Scottish Association for Marine Science (SAMS), working with researchers on the ATLAS project, needed to model how cold-water coral larvae disperse across the North Atlantic. Using Google for Education’s Google Cloud Platform and Compute Engine, the team faced a major challenge: processing a 4-terabyte ocean circulation dataset and running many simulations would normally take weeks.

Google for Education helped SAMS partner with Parallel Works to automate and scale the simulations in the cloud. By running up to 200 nodes concurrently on Google Compute Engine, the team reduced the larval swimming parameter sweep calculation from two weeks to one hour, enabling far faster analysis and many more simulation variables to be explored.

The Scottish Association for Marine Science

Stefan Gary

Honorary Research Fellow in Physical Oceanography