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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."

3 of 154 comments (clear)

  1. 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.

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

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

  3. 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.