Photos: The Cern computers cracking the Big Bang

Inside the IT hub that powers the Large Hadron Collider...

By Nick Heath, 6 October 2008 16:10

Data is stored on the tapes as soon as it comes to the computing centre.

Whenever one of scientists plugged into the LHC Computing Grid requests data, it is retrieved by a robot within the StorageTek vault as seen here.

The centre currently has four robots, each holding about 20,000 tapes, and it's planning to fit in two more.

Using existing tape technology the room would be full up within 10 years. However, Jouanigot said that the centre is constantly upgrading to tapes with higher data density, adding that each tape now stored about 750GB compared to about 200GB two years ago.

Photo credit: Cern

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