Too few HDDs for scientific experiments.
Thai floods derail Hadron-colliding antimatter boffinry • The Register.
It’s not just OEMs, computer shops and data recovery companies that running short of hard disk storage space due to the flooding in Thailand last year. Now it seems that the Large Hadron Collider (and its associated computer network) have run short of disk space.
Crunching the deluge of data coming out of the LHC experiment relies on a network of computers called the International Science Grid that stores, shares and processes the information.
“But we’re crying out for storage, and the floods in Thailand didn’t help. It’s compromising our experiment,” he explained. “We have seven petabytes of storage and it’s not enough.”
The CERN experiment’s hardware emits a raw flow of 50 million petabytes a year. The majority of that data is discarded, reducing the wedge to 15PB, and then split between computers on the International Science Grid.
All in all, that’s a lot of data to contend with.