SNIC storage

SNIC storage The Swedish Storage Initiative

In scientific areas such as high energy physics (the Large Hadron Collider at CERN), climate modelling, bioinformatics, bioimaging etc., the demands for storage are increasing dramatically. To serve these and other user communities, SNIC has appointed a working group to design a storage strategy, taking into account the needs on many levels and creating a unified storage infrastructure, which is now being implemented.

Centre Storage

Centre storage is a storage solution that lives independently of the computational resources and can be accessed from all such resources at a centre. Different centres should also have a common method for accessing the local centre storage, using common names for environment variables.

Hardware for centre storage is in the process of being procured and installed at the SNIC centres.

National Storage

The aim of the nationally accessible storage is to build a robust, flexible and expandable system that can be used in most cases where access to large scale storage is needed. To the user it should appear as a single large system, while it is desirable that some parts of the system are distributed across all SNIC centres to benefit from the advantages of, among other things, locality and cache effects. The system is intended as a versatile long-term storage system.