ESRF inaugurates new data centre

On 26 May 2011, a new ESRF data centre was inaugurated by Jean Moulin, Chairman ESRF Council, Rafael Abela, Chairman ESRF Scientific Advisory Committee, and Francesco Sette, ESRF Director General.

The raw product of any experiment at the ESRF is data, and the amount of data they produce continues to double roughly every 18 months. Ten years ago, 1 PetaByte storage requirements were difficult to imagine. Today, it has become the standard unit for data-intense facilities like the LHC (15 PetaByte/year) or the ESRF (several PetaByte/year).

The challenge is to manage this flow of data efficiently and within a limited budget in a properly dimensioned and efficient IT infrastructure. With an eye on the future, the ESRF has invested in a second data centre which is also a deliverable of the Upgrade Programme, providing a high-quality environment for central data storage, compute power and network electronics, as well as the software needed to access and manage these resources.

Already today, the new data centre is equipped with state-of-the-art file servers capable of storing 1.5 PetaByte, a tape-based archiving facility of several PetaBytes, compute clusters with a peak performance of 15 TeraFLOPs and an extensive 10 Gbit/s Ethernet infrastructure. This can easily be extended thanks to pre-installed power, cooling and netwirking resources.

The inauguration event took place two years earlier than initially planned. In view of the urgency of additional capacity, an earlier plan to host the new data centre in a new building was dropped in 2009, and the existing Central Building data centre extended instead, at an equivalent cost of 2 M€. The main characteristics of the new centre are a floor surface of 300m2 and 300 kW power with full-power 10 minute UPS backup.

The works lasted for 18 months and were finished on time and on budget. A unique feature was that all civil construction and installation work was done with the existing equipment kept operating in the same area.

Today, the ESRF has an environment allowing to respond flexibly to the demands of the scientific community for storage, data analysis capacity and data backup, for many years to come.

Category:

Science & Technology

Tags:

• ESRF
• synchrotron
• computer

[rogershomework]

Please fix the wobbling light!!!@#!@