of research data ranging from astrophysics to climate science to particle physics, and more. A new upgrade to hardware and software brings good news to over 52,000 users of TACC's Ranch long-term mass data storage system.
The archives are valuable to scientists who want to use the data to help reproduce the measurements and results of prior research. Computational reproducibility is one piece of the larger concept of scientific reproducibility, which forms a cornerstone of the scientific method.
TACC strives to comprehensively support the data needs of scientists. The local compute systems such as Stampede2 and Lonestar provide a high-speed scratch space dedicated for temporary storage of data. Next up the ladder are the front-facing data collection systems of Stockyard and Corral, which provide a combined storage of 50 petabytes directly accessible through high speed web connections or the iRODS data grid. Ranch, on the other hand, allows long-term archiving of data for months to years.
As of April 2019, Ranch stores over 70 petabytes, or 70 million gigabytes of scientific data. Over 52,000 users have uploaded close to 1.7 billion computer files on the old library of Ranch that's being upgraded. Hypothetically, the new upgrades to Ranch could expand its storage to reach a mind-boggling exabyte, or 1,000 petabytes.
"For users, more data will be more readily available, with 15 times more disk cache than what we had on the previous Ranch system," said Tommy Minyard, director of Advanced Computing Systems at TACC. Fresh data that's generated from TACC supercomputers such as Stampede2, Lonestar, or Maverick is staged first on Ranch's spinning disk and flash drives, then later moved to tapes.
Ranch has been upgraded with a block storage system supplied by DataDirect Networks, the DDN SFA14K DCR, which provides 30 petabytes of spinning disk cache, versus just two on the replaced hardware. "That means that we'll be able to keep a lot more data staged on disks so that it's more quickly retrievable and you don't have to recall it from tape," Minyard added.
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-tacc-ranch-technology-valuable-storage.html
"For users, more data will be more readily available, with 15 times more disk cache than what we had on the previous Ranch system," said Tommy Minyard, director of Advanced Computing Systems at TACC. Fresh data that's generated from TACC supercomputers such as Stampede2, Lonestar, or Maverick is staged first on Ranch's spinning disk and flash drives, then later moved to tapes.
Ranch has been upgraded with a block storage system supplied by DataDirect Networks, the DDN SFA14K DCR, which provides 30 petabytes of spinning disk cache, versus just two on the replaced hardware. "That means that we'll be able to keep a lot more data staged on disks so that it's more quickly retrievable and you don't have to recall it from tape," Minyard added.
https://phys.org/news/2019-05-tacc-ranch-technology-valuable-storage.html
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