The partnership enables NASA climate data storage to support the 2026 IEEE SciVis Contest
Toronto, Ontario and Salt Lake City, Utah, 14 October 2024: The University of Utah’s Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute (SCI) and Seal Storage Technology, a leading provider of verifiable decentralized cloud storage, are partnering with The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) Visualization conference to provide NASA climate data for the 2026 IEEE SciVis Contest. The IEEE Contest brings together university students, research scientists, national labs, and faculty to tackle a data challenge announced today at the IEEE VIS conference. The 2026 contest participants will use a 4PB NASA climate data set stored by Seal to create advanced data analysis and visualization scenarios. The challenge encourages innovative solutions that address real-world issues such as climate prediction, power grid resilience, and environmental impact analysis.
“In partnership with the University of Utah, Seal Storage Technology is thrilled to provide verifiable decentralized cloud storage for the 2026 IEEE SciVis Contest using several petabytes of NASA climate data. We look forward to seeing the innovative visualizations created by the participants,” said Scott Doughman, Chief Business Officer at Seal Storage Technology.
Data access is made possible by an ongoing partnership between Seal and the University of Utah using OpenViSUS technology supported by the cyberinfrastructure developed by the National Science Data Fabric. In 2023, Seal and the University of Utah made over 200 terabytes of NASA climate data accessible, with a proof of concept enabling researchers around the world to access and visualize the data with zero egress fees. Through the IEEE data challenge, participants will be able to use the complete four petabytes of this NASA data to create large data visualizations.
“The National Science Data Fabric (NSDF) is excited to see how this collaboration with Seal Storage Technology has enabled, for the first time, to make petabytes of data not only accessible but also usable by the broader scientific community, academic partners, and society stakeholders. I expect this exemplary collaboration, also involving NASA and the U.S.-Canada Center on Climate-Resilient Western Interconnected Grid (NSF WIRED Global Center), to become a model replicated in many other scientific communities such as materials science, dark matter research, and medicine,” said Valerio Pascucci, NSDF Principal Investigator, Professor at Kahlert School of Computing, and Director of the Center for Extreme Data Management and Visualization (CEDMAV) at the University of Utah.
The data includes simulations such as NASA’s ECCO LLC4320, NEX-GDDP-CMIP6, and DYAMOND models to enable participants to visualize the impacts of extreme weather events, ocean currents, and climate change over time. Since the data is hosted entirely on Seal’s innovative decentralized cloud storage platform and encoded through the OpenVisus/Openvisuspy data model, it will be easy for participants to run their visualizations from anywhere in the world using any open-source tools and packages like Jupyter Notebooks, Matplotlib, Python, ParaView, and VTK. Winners of the IEEE Contest will receive a $1,000 cash prize sponsored by ViSOAR.
To learn more about the contest, visit the 2026 IEEE SciVis Contest website.
Seal Storage Technology is a verifiable decentralized cloud storage platform that provides cryptographically secured, enterprise-grade, and compliant data storage. Seal serves enterprises, universities, and research institutes, using the highest data security and protection standards. Seal is SOC2 and HIPAA compliant. Data centers are enterprise-grade and powered by renewable energy. sealstorage.io | X | LinkedIn
The Scientific Computing and Imaging Institute at the University of Utah is an international leader in solving complex, transdisciplinary research problems having broad societal impact through innovation in computer, computational and data science.