Diamond Light Source turns to NetApp Flash Storage

December 5, 2016

The UK’s National Synchrotron Facility, Diamond Light Source, Turns to Netapp Flash Storage for a High-Speed Data Buffer

Industry:

Scientific research and education

The Challenge

Given the nature of its work, computing at Diamond is by necessity extremely processor and storage intensive in order to analyze and store data from the beamlines. To achieve the required computing capacity, Diamond provides a general-purpose compute cluster of approximately 1,900 compute cores and 250,000 GPU cores, which is also used for automated fast data processing on beamlines.

The amounts of data generated from beamline research are so enormous that Diamond stores the data on tape systems because it’s not cost-effective to keep the data on disks forever, utilizing the 2PB of high-performance storage most efficiently. Diamond aims to keep data on disk for approximately six months from time of collection. That said, the organization has a data dispenser that permits clients to download their data onto disks and take it back to their home institution.

Each beamline at Diamond is optimized for a specific technique. However, the synchrotron wanted to implement a high-speed data buffer for data coming off two beamlines so it could be stored locally before being transferred to the central high-performance file system.

The Solution:

NetApp E540 Flash Array

Benefits:

High performance
Easy to scale
Easy to manage
Cost effective

Get In Touch

Contact Q Associates today if you have any questions or would like to discuss your IT requirements in more detail. Tel: 01635 248181 Email: Info@qassociates.co.uk