Storing CERN's Search for God (Particles)

Chris Lindquist writes "Think your storage headaches are big? When it goes live in 2008, CERN's ALICE experiment will use 500 optical fiber links to feed particle collision data to hundreds of PCs at a rate of 1GB/second, every second, for a month. 'During this one month, we need a huge disk buffer,' says Pierre Vande Vyvre, CERN's project leader for data acquisition. One might call that an understatement. CIO.com's story has more details about the project and the SAN tasked with catching the flood of data."

Comments

If Only...

[i_ate_god]

If only I could get porn that fast

there I said it, let's move on now.

Re:Um no...it's a product placement for Quantum

[Anonymous Coward]

Um...no. Actually, it's a product placement PR piece about Quantum's StorNext. (Read page 2...)

We knew there were some serious nerds on Slashdot, but to be potential customers for the same RAID system as CERN, whoa! :)

Backup options

[Mostly a lurker]

I assume they will want to have more than one copy of this for backup purposes. Here is my analysis on their choices. The total data to be backup up (for the month) is taken as a lazy 1 * 60 * 60 * 24 * 30 = 2,592,000 gigabytes

• Printed hardcopy. Many authorities recommend this as you do not need to worry about changes in data formats over time. For exact calculation, we would need to know the font they were planning to use and the character encoding. However, let's take a working assumption that they can cram 10KB of data onto an A4 sheet. That implies 259,200,000,000,000 pages. They will probably not want to use an inkjet printer if they use this solution and may, indeed, choose to acquire multiple printers and split the load. A single printer at 10 ppm would take approximately 50,000 years to complete the backup. On 70gm paper, it would weigh a little over two million tons. At any rate, this would certainly produce reams of output.
• Diskettes. This was good enough for nearly everyone 15 years ago. It is curious that such a tried and trusted technique is no longer in fashion. I assume regular 3.5" 1.44MB diskettes, generally recognised as easier to handle than 5.25". We shall need around 1,800,000,000 diskettes. One drawback is the person changing the diskettes as each one filled up might become a little bored after a while. On the positive side, the backup will be quite a lot faster than the printed solution. Assuming about one diskette per minute, inclusive of changing disks, the backup could be complete in less than 3,500 years.
• Now considered somewhat old fashioned, punch cards were once a mainstay of every programmer's personal backups. Like printed hardcopy, anyone familiar with the character encoding used, could read the data without needing any access to a computer. If we assume 80 column cards, we would need 32,400,000,000,000 cards. I would be somewhat concerned about the problem of getting this stack of cards back in the correct order if I dropped it. With a weight of about 30 million tons and stretching perhaps 6 million miles end to end, handling certainly would be challenging and an accident very possible.
• Paper (punched) tape was the only alternative on the first computer I used, a basic early model Elliott 803 without the optional magnetic tape. If I recall correctly, you could manage about 10 characters per inch, so you would need a paper tape over 4,000,000,000 miles long. Hmmm, that would be silly. The other solutions are clearly better.

I am sure other options will be considered, but I just wanted to bring these up in case CERN had failed to consider them