San Diego Supercomputer Center: We're kings of archival storage

The San Diego Supercomputer Center says it has boosted its already impressive storage archival capacity to 36 from 25 petabytes. We know you want to know how big that is vs. the complete print inventory of the Library of Congress: that would be 1,400 times it.

The upgrade via IBM's System Storage T1130 Tape Drives gives the University of California, San Diego facility the ability to store 1TB of uncompressed data per cartridge, up from 700GB. Storage backups are also speeded up by more than 50%. 

The supercomputer center says the upgrade enables it to maintain its position as having more archival storage capacity than any other educational institution.

What's a supercomputer center to do with all that storage capacity? Among other things, it stores images of the brain, digital video of bee behavior and visualizations of earthquake simulations.

Having all this capacity, the SDSC has put lots of thought into how best to preserve data, and shared 10 of its tips with us late last year.

The University of California at San Diego’s supercomputing group a year ago said it had upgraded its time-tested DICE data management software and made it available as an open source offering designed to handle up to petabytes of data.

• San Diego Supercomputer Center
• tape storage