The 25PB of disk will act as online storage for data that must be rapidly accessed, while the tape library is categorized as nearline, sort of a compromise between online storage and backup systems. With 380,000 AMD Opteron 6200 Series x86 processors (and 3,000 NVIDIA GPUs), the cluster will use 40Gbps Ethernet technology with aggregate throughput of up to a terabyte per second, Computerworld reported. The primary interconnect, however, is Cray’s Gemini technology.
Spectra Logic, the company supplying the tape drives, said Blue Waters will take a couple of years to scale up to 380PB. Ultimately, it will become “one of the world’s largest active file repositories stored on tape media.” The tape library itself will be capable of read/write speed of up to 2.2 petabytes per hour.
With some understatement, NCSA senior technical program manager Michelle Butler said the requirement to offload massive amounts of scientific data means “we needed a very large tape drive infrastructure.” They’re also presumably going to need a heck of a lot of robots to manage it all.
