CERN, Caltech and HP open scientific datacenter

Geneva, 18 November 97 The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), and Hewlett-Packard start a joint project to build a model scientific-data-analysis center in Pasadena, California. The center, called the Globally Interconnected Object Databases (GIOD) project, will test and evaluate the infrastructure needed to make very large simulations and computing resources available to research physicists.

The team will use the shared-memory 256-processor HP Exemplar X-Class system at Caltech's Center. The Exemplar system will be used to evaluate potential infrastructure components and to simulate the performance and scalability of required systems. By exploring a variety of approaches to data storage, distribution and analysis, researchers will determine which are best-suited to coping with the data-collection rates and data-access patterns of hierarchical mass-storage systems.

The model center will be used to simulate the performance and scalability of object-based database management systems (ODBMS) and to compare networking approaches so that a better understanding is reached of the needs of central and remote computing centers. The companies involved in the project are investigating the computing, networking and data-storage resources required to handle the acquisition of Pbits of data per second and the storage of several Pbytes of data per year.

The headquarters of the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) are located in Geneva, Switzerland. Currently, the following states are members of CERN: Austria, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. In addition, Israel, Japan, the Russian Federation, Turkey, the European Commission and Unesco have observer status. The United States Department of Energy and National Research Foundation are major partners in CERN's Large Hadron Collider program.

The California Institute of Technology (Caltech) has 900 undergraduate and 1,100 graduate students. Caltech also manages NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, as well as several observatories in Southern California and Hawaii. The acquisition of a 256-processor HP Exemplar technical server was funded by the National Science Foundation, the United States Department of Energy and NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Sandra Wermer