CERN kits up with quad-core servers

SWISS-BASED, atom-smashing research lab CERN has bought some more servers.

In May this year CERN will start smashing atoms in its large hadron collider (LHC) in the hope that it can recreate conditions similar to that at the big bang.

The outfit has added 210 Supermicro Superblade Xeon quad core servers bring its farm up to 1,500 servers in total. Helge Meinhard, coordinator for server and storage procurements, of CERN, said: "This year the LHC will start operating and producing an estimated 15 Petabytes of data each year that need to be processed."

So the next time some storage marketing bod starts telling you that we’re no longer talking about terabytes of data but petabytes, remember to point out that the boffins trying to explain how the universe came into being have topped out at 15 petabytes so you won’t really need that much to handle the payroll. µ

L'Inq
http://lhc.web.cern.ch/lhc/