DOME is a joint project with Astron, The Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy, in the area of “Big Data” processing and storage of astronomical data [2013-5, 2012-11]. The Square Kilometre Array (SKA) radio telescope that is currently under design and expected to be operational by 2024 will not only require an extremely high computing performance, but also has extremely challenging data-storage requirements. The SKA storage infrastructures will require technologies way beyond the state of the art to efficiently store the vast amount of data generated—in the range of petabytes per day. The data needs to be stored at the lowest possible cost, should be archived as energy efficiently as possible, and needs to be easily accessible by researchers from various locations worldwide.
In the work package “Access Patterns”, we are working on two main areas of the storage system. The first focuses on the recognition, modeling and prediction of access patterns to data and, based on these access patterns, intelligent and optimized placement of data on multiple storage tiers including, e.g., SSD, high-end and low-end disks, and tape systems.
The second focuses on the optimized use of tape as the lowest-cost storage medium for the foreseeable future, which will be addressed through technologies such LTFS on tape, integration of disk and tape storage for automated data tiering, file caching, and pre-fetching strategies, as well as storage layout optimization on tape. This latter area is closely related to our GPFS-LTFS integration work.
Please visit DOME for more information.
Figure 1: Artist’s rendition of SKA receiver units.
Figure 2. Yusik Kim and Rik Jongerius, scientists at the
ASTRON & IBM Center for Exascale Technology. Behind them
is the Westerbork telescope in The Netherlands.
