How a Frozen Neutrino Observatory Grapples With Staggering Amounts of Data (vice.com)

citadrianne writes: Deep beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, sensors buried in a billion tons of ice—a cubic kilometer of frozen H2O—are searching for neutrinos. "We collect...one neutrino from the atmosphere every ~10 minutes that we sort of care about, and one neutrino per month that comes from an astrophysical sources that we care about a very great deal," researcher Nathan Whitehorn said. "Each particle interaction takes about 4 microseconds, so we have to sift through data to find the 50 microseconds a year of data we actually care about." Computing facilities manager Gonzalo Merino added, "If the filtered data from the Pole amounts to ~36TB/year, the processed data amounts to near 100TB/year." Because IceCube can't see satellites in geosynchronous orbit from the pole, internet coverage only lasts for six hours a day, Whitehorn explained. The raw data is stored on tape at the pole, and a 400-core cluster makes a first pass at the data to cut it down to around 100GB/day. A 4000-CPU dedicated local cluster crunches the numbers. Their storage system has to handle typical loads of "1-5GB/sec of sustained transfer levels, with thousands of connections in parallel," Merino explained.

Comments

Re:Energy

[bobbied]

Fossil fueled Generators.. They use JP-8 which is a military version of Jet 1-A with a lower freezing temperature. JP-8 fueled turbine generators generate electricity. I'm guessing they burn it directly for heat too. The JP-8 is delivered during the "summer" months both over land and by air if necessary though flying fuel in is pretty expensive.

Re:Perhaps they could buy a station wagon and

[buchner.johannes]

In the case of SN 1987A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SN_1987A, a supernova in 1987 which was close enough that we could detect the flood of neutrinos, the neutrinos did as predicted arrive a few hours before the light.

That claim is disputed (as you can see on the page you link to), because the equipment has not reliably recorded the times of arrival of the neutrino detections. What you say about Supernova models predicting neutrinos escaping before light is true, but the observational proof is yet to come... making IceCube even more important.