[NetBehaviour] CERN's Search for God.

[marc garrett]

CERN's Search for God (Particles) Drives Massive Storage Needs.

Think your storage headaches are big? Try being the guy in charge of 
storing the 1GB of data per second every day for a month coming off 
CERN's large hadron collider (LHC).

The LHC experiments will study everything from the tiniest forms of 
matter to the questions surrounding the Big Bang. The latter subject 
provided Pierre Vande Vyvre, a project leader for data acquisition for 
CERN, with a particularly thorny challenge: He had to design a storage 
system for one of the four experiments, ALICE (A Large Ion Collider 
Experiment). It's one of the biggest physics experiments of our time, 
boasting a team of more than 1,000 scientists from around the world.

For one month per year, the LHC will be spitting out project data to the 
ALICE team at a rate of 1GB per second. That's 1GB per second, for a 
full month, "day and night," Vande Vyvre says. For this month, that data 
rate is an entire order of magnitude larger than each of the other three 
experiments being done with the LHC. In total, the four experiments will 
generate petabytes of data.

more...
http://www.cio.com/article/124952