In a little-used 3TIER conference room — the one where old desk chairs go to live out their twilight years — sit two stacks of cardboard boxes containing more boxes: slick, nearly featureless black boxes. One pile stores new CPUs awaiting introduction to the computing cluster.

The other pile stores hard drives shipped to us from the Space Science and Engineering Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Although 3TIER is located in the most wired building in the Pacific Northwest, we calculated that it’s more bandwidth-savvy to ship empty hard drives to Madison and receive full hard drives back. The data acquisition team unpacks them one by one and joins their contents to a massive collection: 12 terabytes of satellite pictures of the planet. These images are the beginnings of the REmapping the World global solar map.

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