| Description: | As part of the ASTRON/JIVE SOS traineeship programme in LOFAR Science Operations, there was a visit to SURFsara in Amsterdam on June 06, 2018. This was to introduce the trainees (Bernard and Emmanuel) and new SOS recruit (Thomas) to the largest long-term storage facility of the LOFAR Long-Term Archive (LTA), where about two-thirds of LOFAR's current incredible 32PB capacity data is stored. The Head of SOS, Dr. Roberto Pizzo, organised the visit. Onno Sweers (Data Storage Unit), Raymond Onno (newly-recruited Support Scientist) and Natalie Danezi (User Support Unit) of SURFsara gave us a guided tour of the infrastructure and facilities at the outfit. SURFsara is one of Netherlands' biggest National Supercomputing and Big Data Storage Facilities. During the tour we visited several systems including the HPC Cloud, Supercomputer Clusters (Cartesius, Lisa and Hadoop), the Grid Infrastructure, Data Ingest Service and the tape library technology Data Archive.
It was interesting to see the Grid infrastructure, where some of the LOFAR data is processed, and the Tape Storage facility where LOFAR LTA is housed. The expandable 200PB capacity tape storage system currently hosts about 40PB of data, a half of which belongs to LOFAR. Amazingly, the SRON analysis Tropomi satellite, the Large Hadron Collider experiments, the gravity wave detectors (LIGO-Virgo), large-scale DNA analyses (BBMRI, Project MinE), dark matter experiments (Xenon1T), and other high-processing power and huge data storage demanding establishments are all affiliates of SURFsara.
|
