On September’08 Sun Microsystems and the Port d'Informació Científica (PIC) signed an agreement to create a Reference Centre for the Massive Storage of Scientific Data which will give support to international research communities. Under this new agreement, Sun Microsystems awards PIC the category of Sun Reference Centre for the Massive Storage of Scientific Data at a global level.
"This is an important step for PIC to be able to fulfil its objective as a coordinating centre of scientific computing in a massive data environment, especially those produced by LHC. The Sun data servers operated by PIC are integrated into the worldwide computing grid through Java-based software. In this environment it is necessary to maintain unprecedented reliabilities and operating results using techniques we will explore together with Sun Microsystems".
Manuel Delfino (Director of th Port d’Informació Científica).
"It is very gratifying for us to form part of this project with PIC which, from Barcelona, will in the future extend its radius of action to other scientific disciplines and use its large storage capacity in the fields of mechanical engineering, cosmology, astrophysics, medicine, etc".
Josep Fígols (Director of the northeastern branch of Sun Microsystems Ibérica).
After a previous collaboration to support IBM tape library implementation, on July’07 the Computing Division of the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) and the Port d'Informació Científica (PIC) signed an agreement to collaborate in increasing the deployment, funtionality, and use of the Enstore mass storage software by the design of small files support in Enstore along with dCache.
This project is intended to reduce the impact on storage resources from users writing small files. which have large performance overheads. In longer term, both partners together will combine their expertise and experience, pooling efforts in the development and evolution of mass storage solutions centered on Enstore.
DIRAC, Distributed Infrastructure with Remote Agent Control, is the LHCb solution to manage all its distributed computing activities. With about 500 physicists, over 500 TB of raw detector data produced every year, and computing resources in more than 100 different centers, LHCb wanted a tool that could allow a small operation team to manage all the computing activities of the experiment. After some years of evolution, DIRAC is the adopted solution. The Port d’Informació Cientifica provides since july 2009 (information soon available).
