Case Study: NIWA future-proofs climate research infrastructure with VAST Data

Selection of the VAST Data Platform by NIWA will streamline management of critical climate data, enabling breakthrough scientific insights

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) required a modern data infrastructure to unify its operations and manage over 20 petabytes of environmental data. The challenge was to seamlessly scale its high-performance computing capabilities to support current CPU-based research and future AI and GPU-driven climate modeling workloads. NIWA selected the VAST Data Platform to address these needs and future-proof its critical research.

VAST Data implemented its platform, which uses a Disaggregated Shared-Everything (DASE) architecture and a global namespace to provide active-active clustering across NIWA's sites. This solution streamlined data synchronization, reduced operational complexity, and shrunk the physical infrastructure footprint, leading to significant cost savings over six years. The results include improved data accessibility, the ability to run more climate models simultaneously, and the foundation for next-generation, GPU-ready scientific applications, positioning NIWA as a leader in AI-driven environmental science.

The National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research

Jeff Zais

HPC Senior Science Advisor and Platform Architect