Large Synoptic Survey Telescope

Donald Petravick, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Usage Details

Gregory Daues, Jason Alt, William (Bill) Glick, David Freemon, Donald Petravick, Backup User, LSST Backup User

NCSA has the responsibility for developing concepts for production computing for the overall LSST project. The current technical baseline for LSST specifies that a production HPSS system would be purchased and used as foundational infrastructure for a bulk production system and an archive.

The purpose of the archive system is to hold invariant data of lesser interest, such as older annual releases. However, in the production system, the HPSS tape system is to support a rolling window of active data on disk, where the input data is drawn from table, and output projects written to tape.

For these reasons the LSST project at NCSA would like to gain experience with an HPSS system. The immediate project is to study the interaction of HPSS and the archival needs of the project. The LSST project currently has ~100 TB of research data, and anticipates growing to 250 TB this year. Topics include moving data into and out of the store, understanding retrieval from tape, given the timing characteristics of tape media.