User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.5) Gecko/20050118
During the accelerator down time in September, the Scientific Computing
systems will be shut down for planned upgrades. All JASMine and Auger
systems, including all mass storage (/mss, /work, /cache) and batch and
interactive farm nodes (IFARM*, FARM*), will be unavailable.
The JASMine/Auger outage is scheduled for September 6-7, to install a
new Central Dispatcher for JASMine data movement, and to update data
mover clients to use the new dispatcher. The system will then undergo
production testing through September 12.
This upgrade will increase data throughput for the mass storage system,
and paves the way for the upcoming project to compress data and reuse
tapes, saving a significant amount of money over purchasing new blank
tapes. Another important change is the increase in supported file sizes
from 2GB to 10GB.
The tape copy/compression project will begin shortly thereafter. This
project reuses tapes previously written at a lower density of 60GB per
tape with StorageTek 9940A tape drives. The same media can store 200GB
per tape when written with our current 9940B tape drives. Approximately
8000 9940A-formatted tapes will be rewritten with the 9940B drives,
freeing over 5000 tapes for reuse at the higher density. At
approximately $80 per tape, we're eager to get started!
The mass storage system at JLab currently stores 1.3 petabytes of data
in two StorageTek Powderhorn 9310 silos that hold almost 6000 tapes
each. With less than 10% of slots currently unused, we would only be a
short time away from exceeding capacity. When replaced with all 200GB
tapes, the silo capacity reaches just over 2PB. Each year the amount of
data written by the experiments increases, with an expected 400
terabytes (0.4PB) to be written during this fiscal year. Current
planning includes a new silo purchase early in FY08, with some of the
oldest data being moved offline in FY07.