About Pawsey

Two Spectra TFinity libraries, each with 12 frames and IBM® TS1150 drives and media

Pawsey is unique in the Australian scientific landscape as an unincorpo-rated joint venture that brings together the federal government, Western Australian government, university partners (the CSIRO, Curtin University, Edith Cowan University, Murdoch University and the University of Western Australia) and collaborating organizations in a consortium that has been steadily producing outcomes for more than 14 years.

SummaryThirteen billion years ago the first stars and galaxies began to form. Researchers and radio astronomers are investigating this “Cosmic Dawn” and other astronomical events with two next-generation radio telescopes based in Western Australia. The telescopes – the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) – are groundbreaking scientific demonstrators for the design of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world’s largest radio telescope.

Observations from these precursor telescopes generate immense amounts of data, requiring large-scale storage and a world-class supercomputing data system accessible by astronomy researchers. The Pawsey Super- computing Centre provides a hierarchical storage management (HSM) solution to address the ASKAP and MWA data storage challenge. The Spectra® TFinity® Tape Library is an integral part of the data storage system, paving the way for future expansion to accommodate the large-scale data management of the SKA project.

The Pawsey Supercomputing Centre provides cutting-edge supercomputing resources to scientists across Australia. It is

home of ‘Magnus’, one of the most powerful research computers in the Southern Hemisphere, and focuses

on radio astronomy, energy, and resources research, supporting also other diverse fields of science. The

centre is supporting the Square Kilometre Array, which seeks to

answer humanity’s greatest questions about the universe.

The Centre is focused on providing integrated research solutions by

giving users simultaneous access to world class expertise and

infrastructure in supercomputing, data, and visualization services.

Nathan Thompson, CEO of Spectra Logic

Pawsey Supercomputing Centre supports the future of radio astronomy with a storage solution from Spectra Logic

303-449-6400 • 800-833-1132 • (Fax) 303-939-8844 • 6285 Lookout Road • Boulder, CO 80301 USA • www.spectralogic.com

The modern design of the Spectra TFinity tape library provides a tape archive and backup solution to fully meet the needs of the high-performance computing market. TFinity offers industry-leading scalability with the speed necessary to meet the requirements of the most data-intensive environments in the world.

303-449-6400 • 800-833-1132 • (Fax) 303-939-8844 • 6285 Lookout Road • Boulder, CO 80301 USA • www.spectralogic.com

The ChallengeIn a radio-quiet zone, 850 kilometres north of Perth, sits the Murchison Radio Observatory (MRO) on which the MWA and ASKAP radio telescopes are located. The MWA telescope is comprised of over 2,000 “dipole” antennas, which squat like an army of robot spiders over 7 square kilometres of the Murchison outback. Nearby stands the CSIRO-operated ASKAP telescope, a collection of 36 novel dish antennas that rapidly survey the sky using innovative Phased Array Feeds. The telescopes are collecting radio waves from the other side of the universe, attempting to look back in time to the origins of the galaxies to investigate how stars and plan-ets were formed after the Big Bang.

The MWA produces around 60 gigabytes of data per second, which is about 8,700 times faster than the average Austra-lian Internet can download. This data is processed and reduced through systems housed at the MRO and streamed down to Pawsey Supercomputing Centre in Perth.

“In just one day we get around 45 terabytes from MWA,” said Paul Newman, HSM spe-cialist at Pawsey Supercomputing.

“It’s expected that ASKAP produces around 14 terabytes a day. They will be streaming about 400 megabytes a second from their observations. That’s equivalent to about one standard DVD every 30 seconds.”

The huge amount of data generated by the MWA and ASKAP telescopes presents a data storage challenge for the institu-tions, radio astronomers and researchers involved. Not only does there need to be a sophisticated storage facility to host this big data, but it also needs to be easily accessible by researchers. Additionally, the same facility requires high capacity and scalable data storage technology to provide for the future SKA project, which is estimated to capture 10 times more data than the current global internet traffic.

The SolutionThe state-of-the-art data storage fa-cilities at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre comprise an intricate system, with “layers” of high-end storage, includ-ing the integral TFinity tape library. After telescopes collect the data onsite, it passes through a dedicated network of

10-gigabit optical fibre links and streams down to the Pawsey Centre. “Basically, after data arrives at the MWA disk cache at Pawsey, it is transferred onto Pawsey’s infrastructure. This includes a data migration facility (DMF) which pro-vides a multi-layered hierarchical storage management solution. DMF migrates data off primary disk and writes it to two copies on tape (one copy in each library), then restores it back to disk automatically when required by a researcher,” said Newman.“Pawsey’s TFinity tape library is a part of the HSM solution. The hierarchy has tiers of storage, including one tape tier and one disk. The data moves between tiers as required to make room for new data.“Our data will always stay on tape, but it can be called into the other servers if a researcher needs a particular file,” added Newman.Pawsey has two 12-frame Spectra TFinity tape libraries with 32 IBM® TS1150 tape drives per library. Researchers have access to a massive 40 petabytes of data across its two tape libraries in an active archive environment.

The OutcomeThe advanced data management facili-ties at Pawsey offer a comprehensive solution to the vast amounts of radio astronomy data that the MWA and ASKAP projects produce, with data be-

ing available for researchers to access for scientific analysis.

A vital part of Pawsey’s HSM system are the Spectra TFinity tape libraries. An advantage of this core infrastructure is the fact that data storage capacities will be easy to increase when the SKA begins producing data.

“Tape libraries are highly expandable and easy to upgrade with denser media. This flexibility matches our current and future data storage needs exactly and makes the TFinity tape libraries an excellent solution for us,” said Newman.

“The ASKAP and MWA were planned to be part of a five-year project, so it is highly likely that the Spectra TFinity tape library will still be here at the end of that and possibly beyond that for up to 10 years.”

From its current storage capacity of 40 petabytes, Pawsey can expand its leading-edge storage capability up to 100 petabytes once the SKA telescope is operational.

“This Pawsey infrastructure is integral to the SKA project because it’s going to continue to store all the radio astronomy data for the precursor projects. Our data will then be drawn upon for the construc-tion and implementation of the interna-tional SKA telescope,” said Newman.

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CASE STUDY: Pawsey Supercomputing Centre