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Storing CERN's Search for God (Particles)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the she-is-in-the-details-or-so-i'm-told dept.

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."

7 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. Um no...it's a product placement for Quantum by xxxJonBoyxxx · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  2. Re:News for Nerds! by xyvimur · · Score: 4, Informative

    Just go there and take a guided tour. If you'll hurry you'll be able to go to the detector pit and see it. Otherwise after starting up it will be inaccesible for visitors for the life-cycle of the experiments (10-20 years). Google for CERN visit service.

    Milosz

  3. Re:Thousands of disk drives. by noggin143 · · Score: 5, Informative

    We are expecting to record around 15PB / year during the LHC running. This data is stored onto magnetic tape with petabytes of disk cache to give reasonable performance. A grid of machines distributed worldwide analyses the data. More details are available on the CERN web site www.cern.ch.

  4. Re:PC's? by Rodolpho+Zatanas · · Score: 5, Informative

    load"*",8,1 would load something from a diskette, not a cassette.

  5. Not So Huge by PenGun · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's only 5x HD SDI single channel ~ 200MB/s. Any major studio could handle this with ease.

    SDI is how the movie guys move their digital stuff around. A higher end digital camera will capture at 2x HD SDI for a 2K res, 4:4:4 colour space. A few of em' and you got your 1GB/s easy. Spools onto godlike RAID arrays.

      Get em' to call up Warner Bros if they have problems.

  6. 30 racks, $1.8M in disks by this+great+guy · · Score: 3, Informative

    Assuming a non-RAID 3x-replication tech solution (what Google do in their datacenters), using 500-GB disks (best $/GB ratio), they would need about 16 thousands disks:

    .001 (TB/sec) * 3600*24*30 (sec/month) * 3 (copies) * 2 (disk/TB) = 15552 disks

    Which would cost about $1.8M (disks alone):

    15552 (disk) * 110 ($/disk) = $1710720

    Packed in high-density chassis (48 disks in 4U, or 12 disks per rack unit), they could store this amount of data in about 30 racks:

    15552 (disk) / 12 (disk/rack unit) / 42 (rack unit/rack) = 30.9 racks

    Now for various reasons (vendors influence, inexperienced consultants, my experience in the IT world in general, etc), I have a feeling they are going to end up with a solution unnecessarily complex, much more expensive, and hard to maintain and expand... Damn, I would love to be this project leader !

  7. well if no one else is going to say it by Main+Gauche · · Score: 3, Informative

    "Imagine how deep the personality problems must run in a person who gets all hot because of someone's DNA sequences!"

    You must be new here.