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High-Performing, Space-Saving Sun Solution Helps Physics Research Organization Meet Massive Data Analysis Need Sun Fire X4500 servers with a 400 terabytes storage capacity and Sun tape technology
On September the 10th, the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) began experiments with its Large Hadron Collider (LHC), the world's most powerful particle accelerator. Physicists will use the LHC to recreate the conditions just after the Big Bang, by colliding two beams of subatomic particles head-on, at very high energy. Teams of physicists from around the world will then analyze the particles created in the collision to gain a better understanding of some of the fundamental laws of nature. The French Physics organization, IN2P3/CNRS, which is responsible for collecting data from the experiments on the LHC at CERN, has chosen to use Sun servers, Solaris and Sun StorageTek tape libraries to house the data that they collect. IN2P3/CNRS has acquired Sun Fire X4500 servers with a 400 terabytes storage capacity and Sun tape technology to help ensure that adequate data processing resources are available for experiments conducted with the LHC. IN2P3/CNRS, the French organization National Institute of Nuclear Physics and Particle Physics was founded in 1971 to promote research in nuclear physics and high energy. Its Computing Center was created to provide processing support for important and data-intensive scientific experiments. It supports the LHC project by providing one of the key computing centers of the grid infrastructure. It also builds and maintains infrastructure to support the computing needs of the physics community using this LHC and provide the data processing infrastructure for several scientific international collaborations. The field of particle physics generates colossal amounts of data requiring in-depth analysis. To handle these needs IN2P3/CNRS created a computing center in France to supply technology resources to support a dedicated community of researchers. For more than 20 years, the IN2P3 Computing Center has played a major role in providing processing power, expertise in data-intensive operations and high-bandwidth networking for the field’s most important scientific experiments. The IN2P3/CNRS is now embarking on its most ambitious particle-physics experiment -- the LHC, the world’s largest particle accelerator that will be fully operational in 2008. It is a data-intensive instrument, expected to generate 40 million particle collisions per second. The vast amount of data to be generated from the LHC presented an IT challenge -- how quickly can the data be processed? "Based on our analysis and pricing and warranty considerations, a final grade was attributed to each vendor’s RFP response. Taking into consideration footprints, energy efficiency, solution scope and price, the Sun solution -- including Sun Fire X4500 servers --was clearly superior to the others. It achieved our energy efficiency objective and provided a minimal footprint -- six meters versus nine meters for other solutions we considered and it is extremely reliable. " -- Pierre Larrieu, Purchasing and Public Markets Manager, IN2P3 No computing center existed to single-handedly absorb this amount of data. As a result, the Worldwide LHC Computing Grid (W-LCG) project was established. The W-LCG grid is a network of more than 100 computing centers located throughout Europe, America and Asia. These centers currently supply the computing power equivalent of 20,000 personal computers and are expected to grow to an equivalent of 70,000 processors in 2008. IN2P3/CNRS is one of eleven key centers in the grid's first level responsible for reception, long-term storage and redistribution of experimental data. IN2P3/CNRS liked the Solaris 10 Operating System’s Zettabyte File System (ZFS) feature because it does an excellent job of managing storage and disks, simplifies administration and detects and corrects data corruption. The next step was benchmark testing with some storage applications on both Linux and Solaris 10 OS. The Sun solution with Solaris 10 OS showed superior performance and better hardware support. The team also found the hardware easy to administer and felt Sun’s support with a dedicated systems engineer was excellent. Based on these results, IN2P3/CNRS installed 46 Sun Fire X4500 servers running the Solaris 10 OS to provide processing power on the grid. Acquisition costs were under budget, which was important given that taxpayers fund the organization. Reliability and operational benefits have been important as well. The center found the Sun hardware to be very reliable and has not experienced a single instance of data loss. With this initial success, IN2P3/CNRS is adding an additional 1.6 petabytes of disk storage through 85 additional Sun Fire X4500 servers. Sun consultants are also helping IN2P3 increase the scalable capacity of its primary storage system by consolidating a portion of its tape environment from legacy Sun tape libraries to a Sun StorageTek SL8500 modular tape library with 30 Sun StorageTek T10000 tape drives to handle large data files and 20 Sun StorageTek LTO4 tape drives for smaller files. Expectations for this project and its ability to reveal unknown secrets of the universe are high. Undoubtedly, the world’s view of the universe will change in part due to this new computing power devoted to scientific exploration. More Information
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"Twenty-seven kilometers of tunnel under ground;
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A circle that crosses through Switzerland and France;
Sixty nations contribute to scientific advance" 
High-Performing, Space-Saving Sun Solution Helps Physics Research Organization Meet Massive Data Analysis Need
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