At Long Last, Supercomputing Helps to Map the Poles

By Oliver Peckham

August 22, 2019

“For years,” Paul Morin wrote[*], “those of us that made maps of the Poles apologized. We apologized for the blank spaces on maps, we apologized for mountains being in the wrong place and out-of-date information.” Now, after a decade of painstaking work, the time for apologies is over. A major collaboration between universities, the U.S. government and a software company has produced an unprecedentedly accurate map of the poles – and it was made possible by supercomputing.

Paul Morin. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

Morin is the founder and director of the Polar Geospatial Center at the University of Minnesota, where he and dozens of other researchers help the National Science Foundation (NSF) map the Earth’s poles. Morin also liaises between the NSF and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA) and serves on the National Academy of Sciences’ Standing Committee on Antarctic Geographic Information. 

In short: if you’re interested in polar mapping, he’s your guy.

“It’s to serve places like this,” Morin said in a recent NSF-hosted webinar, pointing out a field camp in the dry valleys of Antarctica. “When we’re out there working, we’re sleeping in tents. […] As we were working, we didn’t have access to the kind of resources we have now. And so […] we flew around in helicopters, we had differential GPS, and we were geo-referencing air photography that was collected often in the 80’s, 90’s or the 00’s.”

Morin’s point is well-taken: for those working on or over the poles – not just researchers, but National Guard and Air Force servicemen as well – the accuracy of polar maps is a day-to-day, functional concern. (“I mean, this is the way that we get to work in the morning,” Morin said.)

The scope of the project was staggering. Antarctica is 15 million square miles – 50 percent larger than the contiguous U.S. “We can use all the standards superlatives – the highest, the driest, the coldest – but from my standpoint,” he said, “it’s just big.” But Antarctica, of course, is only one part of the equation. On the other end (quite literally): the Arctic, which is twice the size of the contiguous U.S.

Luckily, Earth-observing satellites tend to be in a polar orbit, constantly taking images of  the poles. The problem, then, became wrangling what Morin calls an “incredible fire hose of imagery” from NASA, the European Space Agency and commercial satellite operators. The imagery that the researchers were able to request allowed for pinpoint accuracy. “If you were to look at the ground in the valleys,” Morin said, “and if you were to put a single oak leaf in a specific location, you could detect the chlorophyll in that oak leaf in a 1.8 meter square pixel.”

But a single, detailed map wasn’t enough.

“You […] just don’t get the repeat that science would need, because the Earth’s surface is always changing,” Morin said of older surveying methods. “All these things – we want to be able to measure and see what the difference is.”

Then, five years ago, the U.S. gained the chairmanship of the Arctic Council and announced plans to create a robust elevation map of the Arctic. Morin and his colleagues realized that this was their opportunity to create an evolving topographic dataset for polar regions. The following year, President Obama announced a project with the NSF and the NGA to create that dataset for Alaska within one year and the Arctic within two.

With NGA’s satellite imagery contracts now at their fingertips, the newly formed team needed tools to process that massive amount of data. They turned to Ohio State University (OSU) and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. OSU provided software that allowed the team to feed stereo imagery into an HPC system and receive a digital elevation model (DEM) with very little human intervention. The NCSA, of course, provided the firepower: Blue Waters, a hybrid Cray supercomputer that delivers roughly 13 petaflops, over 1.5 petabytes of memory and about 26 petabytes of storage. Over time, the team received allocations on Stampede2 and Frontier as well.

REMA’s coverage area. Image courtesy of the University of Minnesota.

They got to work. The team produced a five-meter resolution elevation model of Alaska, then refined it to two meters. Then the Arctic: 12 percent of the Earth mapped at a two-meter resolution. Then Antarctica – another 8 percent. They produced REMA (the Reference Elevation Model of Antarctica) and, later, ArcticDEM, a tool for extracting those two-meter Arctic DEMs from Blue Waters.

Morin walked through the particulars of how granular these maps could be – individual trees being logged, ice melt, lava flows. “We now have better topography for the ice on Earth than we do for the land on Earth,” Morin said. “There really isn’t anywhere else on the planet that we just have this much repeat.”

The project was a success, and NGA and NSF have extended their collaboration and their time on Blue Waters – this time, with the aim to extend the polar mapping project to the entire surface of the Earth.

“When we began this, we just didn’t have HPC experience,” said Morin. “Last time I touched HPC before this project, the computer was a Cray-2. We needed software like Swift and Parsl for sub-scheduling – we’re doing hundreds of thousands of jobs, huge networking and automation. The community just isn’t used to this – you know, the next version of the poles is probably two petabytes! […] These projects are too big for any one agency – we’re talking public, private, multiple agencies, civilian defense… we have to bring everybody to bear on projects this large.”

To Morin, though, this is clearly still just the beginning. Morin cites a project (“Planet”) that is launching hundreds of shoebox-sized satellites for geospatial mapping. “There’s so much data coming through there that we just can’t think of how we’re going to process it even now,” he said. Of course, he does have some ideas: he recalls another project (“Iceberg”) using machine learning algorithms to detect permafrost in the Arctic.

“So,” he says excitedly, “if we can keep throwing imagery at this…”

[*] Paul Morin’s talk, “The use of NSF HPC for the Production of the Earth’s Topography,” was held last week as part of the NSF Office of Advanced Cyberinfrastructure’s Cyberinfrastructure Webinar Series. To read more about the talk, click here.

Subscribe to HPCwire's Weekly Update!

Be the most informed person in the room! Stay ahead of the tech trends with industry updates delivered to you every week!

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion XL — were added to the benchmark suite as MLPerf continues Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing power it brings to artificial intelligence.  Nvidia's DGX Read more…

Call for Participation in Workshop on Potential NSF CISE Quantum Initiative

March 26, 2024

Editor’s Note: Next month there will be a workshop to discuss what a quantum initiative led by NSF’s Computer, Information Science and Engineering (CISE) directorate could entail. The details are posted below in a Ca Read more…

Waseda U. Researchers Reports New Quantum Algorithm for Speeding Optimization

March 25, 2024

Optimization problems cover a wide range of applications and are often cited as good candidates for quantum computing. However, the execution time for constrained combinatorial optimization applications on quantum device Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at the network layer threatens to make bigger and brawnier pro Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HBM3E memory as well as the the ability to train 1 trillion pa Read more…

MLPerf Inference 4.0 Results Showcase GenAI; Nvidia Still Dominates

March 28, 2024

There were no startling surprises in the latest MLPerf Inference benchmark (4.0) results released yesterday. Two new workloads — Llama 2 and Stable Diffusion Read more…

Q&A with Nvidia’s Chief of DGX Systems on the DGX-GB200 Rack-scale System

March 27, 2024

Pictures of Nvidia's new flagship mega-server, the DGX GB200, on the GTC show floor got favorable reactions on social media for the sheer amount of computing po Read more…

NVLink: Faster Interconnects and Switches to Help Relieve Data Bottlenecks

March 25, 2024

Nvidia’s new Blackwell architecture may have stolen the show this week at the GPU Technology Conference in San Jose, California. But an emerging bottleneck at Read more…

Who is David Blackwell?

March 22, 2024

During GTC24, co-founder and president of NVIDIA Jensen Huang unveiled the Blackwell GPU. This GPU itself is heavily optimized for AI work, boasting 192GB of HB Read more…

Nvidia Looks to Accelerate GenAI Adoption with NIM

March 19, 2024

Today at the GPU Technology Conference, Nvidia launched a new offering aimed at helping customers quickly deploy their generative AI applications in a secure, s Read more…

The Generative AI Future Is Now, Nvidia’s Huang Says

March 19, 2024

We are in the early days of a transformative shift in how business gets done thanks to the advent of generative AI, according to Nvidia CEO and cofounder Jensen Read more…

Nvidia’s New Blackwell GPU Can Train AI Models with Trillions of Parameters

March 18, 2024

Nvidia's latest and fastest GPU, codenamed Blackwell, is here and will underpin the company's AI plans this year. The chip offers performance improvements from Read more…

Nvidia Showcases Quantum Cloud, Expanding Quantum Portfolio at GTC24

March 18, 2024

Nvidia’s barrage of quantum news at GTC24 this week includes new products, signature collaborations, and a new Nvidia Quantum Cloud for quantum developers. Wh Read more…

Alibaba Shuts Down its Quantum Computing Effort

November 30, 2023

In case you missed it, China’s e-commerce giant Alibaba has shut down its quantum computing research effort. It’s not entirely clear what drove the change. Read more…

Nvidia H100: Are 550,000 GPUs Enough for This Year?

August 17, 2023

The GPU Squeeze continues to place a premium on Nvidia H100 GPUs. In a recent Financial Times article, Nvidia reports that it expects to ship 550,000 of its lat Read more…

Shutterstock 1285747942

AMD’s Horsepower-packed MI300X GPU Beats Nvidia’s Upcoming H200

December 7, 2023

AMD and Nvidia are locked in an AI performance battle – much like the gaming GPU performance clash the companies have waged for decades. AMD has claimed it Read more…

DoD Takes a Long View of Quantum Computing

December 19, 2023

Given the large sums tied to expensive weapon systems – think $100-million-plus per F-35 fighter – it’s easy to forget the U.S. Department of Defense is a Read more…

Synopsys Eats Ansys: Does HPC Get Indigestion?

February 8, 2024

Recently, it was announced that Synopsys is buying HPC tool developer Ansys. Started in Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1970 as Swanson Analysis Systems, Inc. (SASI) by John Swanson (and eventually renamed), Ansys serves the CAE (Computer Aided Engineering)/multiphysics engineering simulation market. Read more…

Choosing the Right GPU for LLM Inference and Training

December 11, 2023

Accelerating the training and inference processes of deep learning models is crucial for unleashing their true potential and NVIDIA GPUs have emerged as a game- Read more…

Intel’s Server and PC Chip Development Will Blur After 2025

January 15, 2024

Intel's dealing with much more than chip rivals breathing down its neck; it is simultaneously integrating a bevy of new technologies such as chiplets, artificia Read more…

Baidu Exits Quantum, Closely Following Alibaba’s Earlier Move

January 5, 2024

Reuters reported this week that Baidu, China’s giant e-commerce and services provider, is exiting the quantum computing development arena. Reuters reported � Read more…

Leading Solution Providers

Contributors

Comparing NVIDIA A100 and NVIDIA L40S: Which GPU is Ideal for AI and Graphics-Intensive Workloads?

October 30, 2023

With long lead times for the NVIDIA H100 and A100 GPUs, many organizations are looking at the new NVIDIA L40S GPU, which it’s a new GPU optimized for AI and g Read more…

Shutterstock 1179408610

Google Addresses the Mysteries of Its Hypercomputer 

December 28, 2023

When Google launched its Hypercomputer earlier this month (December 2023), the first reaction was, "Say what?" It turns out that the Hypercomputer is Google's t Read more…

AMD MI3000A

How AMD May Get Across the CUDA Moat

October 5, 2023

When discussing GenAI, the term "GPU" almost always enters the conversation and the topic often moves toward performance and access. Interestingly, the word "GPU" is assumed to mean "Nvidia" products. (As an aside, the popular Nvidia hardware used in GenAI are not technically... Read more…

Shutterstock 1606064203

Meta’s Zuckerberg Puts Its AI Future in the Hands of 600,000 GPUs

January 25, 2024

In under two minutes, Meta's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, laid out the company's AI plans, which included a plan to build an artificial intelligence system with the eq Read more…

Google Introduces ‘Hypercomputer’ to Its AI Infrastructure

December 11, 2023

Google ran out of monikers to describe its new AI system released on December 7. Supercomputer perhaps wasn't an apt description, so it settled on Hypercomputer Read more…

China Is All In on a RISC-V Future

January 8, 2024

The state of RISC-V in China was discussed in a recent report released by the Jamestown Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. The report, entitled "E Read more…

Intel Won’t Have a Xeon Max Chip with New Emerald Rapids CPU

December 14, 2023

As expected, Intel officially announced its 5th generation Xeon server chips codenamed Emerald Rapids at an event in New York City, where the focus was really o Read more…

IBM Quantum Summit: Two New QPUs, Upgraded Qiskit, 10-year Roadmap and More

December 4, 2023

IBM kicks off its annual Quantum Summit today and will announce a broad range of advances including its much-anticipated 1121-qubit Condor QPU, a smaller 133-qu Read more…

  • arrow
  • Click Here for More Headlines
  • arrow
HPCwire