A Low Cost, High Capacity Storage Module for Data Grids in Particle Physics

65428 Modern high-rate, high-energy physics experiments require fast, petabyte scale storage as a key requirement for fast computation and data analysis in a distributed data grid environment. However, existing high-speed commercial solutions do not cost-effectively scale to the petabyte storage range. This project will apply low-cost, commodity magnetic disk drive technology to develop a portable, fifty terabyte module, scalable to a petabyte at a cost comparable to the robotic tape libraries in use today. In Phase I, a fully functional prototype with a capacity of two terabytes was constructed and the feasibility of the basic approach was demonstrated. Phase II will result in a production-ready module with a storage capacity of 20-50 terabytes. A 100 terabyte system based on the technology also will be demonstrated. Commercial Applications and Other Benefits as described by the awardee: The technology should be viable as a short term backup solution in enterprise applications and can be applied to time critical environments where access to very large medical imaging or map databases is required.