News Library
UB BUILDS DIGITAL WAREHOUSE
Published on January 30, 2004
Author: FRED O. WILLIAMS - News Business Reporter
© The Buffalo News Inc.
Supercomputers at the University at Buffalo crunch a lot of numbers, but they don't have a lot of space to keep them in.
Now, a sort of digital warehouse is being built to store the mountains of data that are produced in bioinformatics and other life science research, university officials said. With 75 trillion bytes of capacity, about equal to 100,000 CDs, the "storage area network" will allow scientists at UB -- and at partner research centers in Buffalo's medical campus -- to tackle more data-heavy projects. "Data is actually growing faster than processor speed and storage space," said Russ Miller, director of UB's Center for Computational Research and a senior scientist at Hauptman-Woodward Medical Research Institute. One protein-mapping experiment at Hauptman-Woodward generates images that take up 7 trillion bytes of storage a year, he said. The supplier of the equipment is Hewlett-Packard, the California-based computer maker that is a corporate partner of UB's Center of Excellence in Bioinformatics. The system equipment and related products would normally cost $18 million, an HP spokesman said, but UB is paying a discounted price. Neither HP or university officials would discuss the university's cost. The equipment being installed at UB's supercomputer center at the North Campus in Amherst has arrays of disks and a tape backup in locker-like cabinets. Of its 75 trillion bytes or "terabytes" of storage, 40 are available for researchers, the rest devoted to backup tasks, Miller said. HP is also providing an expert to help run the system initially, and funding a post-doctoral researcher to work on sharing storage capacity between different locations. The customized system is distinguished not only by its size, but also its high number of simultaneous users and a high speed for reading data, measured in gigabytes per second, HP spokesman Bill Carver said. Such high-end storage networks are rare except in large, data-intensive companies like credit-card issuers and drug companies. Companies and organizations are snapping up storage networks to centralize their data, instead of having it spread throughout the organization on disks attached to various machines, said Tim Rasmussen, senior product manager at Datalink in Minnesota, a supplier of storage systems. "It's inefficient to manage and hard to scale, and if a disk goes down you lose access to everything on that server," he said. UB's storage network, working with a grid that links processors plus network connections to the medical campus near downtown Buffalo, will make it easier for scientists to do computation-intensive research, switching between machines and locations without losing access to their data, Miller said. "The bottom line is, scientists can do science, not technology," he said. The data warehouse at UB is capable of housing four times the information in the Library of Congress, according to HP. As a corporate backer of the bioinformatics center, the company has supplied elements of UBs supercomputer and has pledged $10 million in investment capital for area biotech start-ups. The HP equipment being installed includes StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Arrays, StorageWorks ESL9595 tape backup and Unix-based HP AlphaServer GS1280, the company said. e-mail: fwilliams@buffnews.comBILL WIPPERT/Buffalo News
Russ Miller, director of the UB Center for Computational Research,
checks the new Hewlett-Packard Storage Area Network.
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