en.Wedoany.com Reported - The German Aerospace Center (DLR) and the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities have signed a cooperation agreement to further upgrade and expand Terrabyte, a high-performance platform for Earth observation data analysis. On July 7, 2026, Dr. Anke Pagels-Kerp, member of the DLR Space Executive Board; Dr. Doris Klein, Deputy Director of the DLR German Remote Sensing Data Center (DFD); and Professor Dieter Kranzlmüller, Director of LRZ, jointly signed the agreement. Since its launch in 2019, the platform has supported numerous scientific studies and accumulated extensive practical experience in Earth observation data modeling and analysis.

As a first step in the upgrade, Terrabyte's data storage capacity is planned to be expanded in 2027. The platform currently offers approximately 50 petabytes (PB) of storage, with utilization consistently reaching 95%. Computing power will also be further upgraded; its dedicated supercomputer for Earth observation currently delivers 5 petaFLOPS (quadrillion floating-point operations per second), equipped with 636 central processing units (CPUs) and 188 graphics processing units (GPUs). In addition to high processing power, Terrabyte provides over 43 PB of Earth observation and geospatial data for immediate access, along with open-source software and tools for data analysis, computation, and modeling. Via a 10-gigabit-per-second data connection, the platform can directly retrieve additional satellite data stored in the DLR archive in Oberpfaffenhofen and process it on LRZ's supercomputers.

Since the start of the collaboration, Terrabyte has become a success story. The platform currently supports 15 long-term projects, processes approximately 7,000 jobs daily, and serves about 600 users, with around three new users added weekly, spanning 33 DLR institutes. The platform centrally provides 45 datasets and 88 million metadata records. Among these, DLR's "Normalise Radar Backscattering" (NRB) project is the most extensive use case to date. This project aims to convert radar satellite data into "analysis-ready data," reducing preprocessing steps for users. Using the Terrabyte platform, DLR has generated a dataset of approximately 8 PB, equivalent to about two million high-definition movies. Another project, "ROOT – Real-time Earth Observation of Forest Dynamics and Biodiversity," funded by the Bavarian Institute for Digital Transformation (bidt) and the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW), involves an interdisciplinary team from the University of Würzburg (JMU) developing methods to analyze forest disturbances and damage. The ROOT software developed by this team can integrate satellite and other environmental data in real time, enabling businesses and public institutions to monitor forests, helping to control tree pests and utilize damaged timber.

With its computing power, data analysis tools, high storage capacity, and fast data connections, the Terrabyte platform offers an alternative to large cloud infrastructure providers. Researchers can develop and use their own data analysis tools on the platform and securely and conveniently copy results to their own storage media. The platform also promotes digital sovereignty in scientific research. Currently, the Terrabyte team provides consulting to institutions such as the German Environment Agency (Umweltbundesamt) and the National Research Data Infrastructure (NFDI), assisting in the development of similar high-performance platforms for analyzing environmental data. Professor Dieter Kranzlmüller, Director of LRZ, stated that this service is the result of trust and cooperation between DLR and LRZ, and both parties will continue to advance this collaboration.