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SKA precursor starts streaming firehosing astrodata to the world Cramming the universe into a fibre at 1.5 terabytes an hour

8 August, 2013 - AlterEgo | 0 Comments

Hard on the heels of yesterday's discussion of high-performance computing with the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research and the National Computational Infrastructure comes the announcement that real data has started to stream out of Western Australia's Murchison Widefield Array.

In fact, to anybody but the biggest big data enthusiast, “stream” seems an inadequate word for what's leaving this one source. That's because the MWA's 2,048 dual-polarisation dipole antennas, arranged as 128 “tiles” (mostly in a relatively small 1.5 km core region, with some beyond that to yield a 3 km baseline) yield a veritable firehose of data.

The iVEC-managed Pawsey Centre, 800 km distant in Perth is receiving 400 megabytes per second from the telescope – and as discussed here and here, that's after on-site correlators, the first step in processing the telescope data, reduce the amount of data leaving the site to a manageable level.

A dedicated 10 Gbps fibre runs from Murchison to Geraldton, after which dark fibre on the Nextgen Networks-operated Regional Backhaul Blackspots Project link to Perth provides connectivity to the Pawsey Centre.

Murchison iVEC - ICRAR team
The Murchison Widefield Array Data Archive team from ICRAR: Dave Pallot (left) Professor Andreas Wicenec (centre) and Associate Professor Chen Wu (right) at the Pawsey Centre. Image: ICRAR
Just how much work is needed to create a manageable data set is demonstrated by the fact that the MWA's correlators perform half of the entire computation needed by the facility, iVEC says.

That gets the raw data – about 1.5 TB per hour – down to a much more manageable requirement that the Pawsey Centre store a mere 3 PB annually.

And, since in science data becomes more useful the more available it is, there are other institutions in on the act. MIT in the US and the Victoria University in New Zealand already have links to the Pawsey Centre, with another planned to connect India, another partner in the MWA project.

MIT's research is the early Universe, which means there's further filtering carried out. A mere 150 TB has been sent to the USA of astronomy data already collected in the MWA's pilot operations and shipped to Perth on an earlier 1 Gbps link. The new data streams will add 4 TB per day to that.

As previously discussed by The Register, the Pawsey Centre will also host an advanced hierarchical storage management facility, including a 20 Petabyte Spectra Logic tape library, a 6 Petabyte SGI disk-based storage system, and a significant visualisation and post-processing capability provided by SGI in the form of a 6 Terabyte UV2000 and 34 Data Analysis Engines. All of these systems will be interconnected via a high-speed (FDR) Infiniband network.

Managing the distribution of this data is the open-source Next Generation Archive System (NGAS) developed by professor Wicenec while at the European Southern Observatory and modified by an ICRAR for operation at the Pawsey Centre. ®

Future of storage: Micron bets chips on 3D NAND flash – but NOT YET

8 August, 2013 - AlterEgo | 1 Comments

As far as the world's number two DRAM chip-maker is concerned, 2D or planar NAND can go through another lithography cycle before 3D techniques may become necessary because a two-year-old NAND design change has enabled Micron to scale its lithography down to 16nm and maybe beyond.

El Reg interviewed Glen Hawk, Micron's VP for its NAND Solutions Group, who briefed us on the changes. He started out by identifying two fundamentals about Micron in the flash business.

First off, he said, it is a flash foundry operator and "flash manufacturers have an inherent advantage with SSDs." Essentially, they have supply certainty – not knowing where your next chip is coming from has sunk many a storage firm – and the integration of flash design, controller functionality and firmware were two of the advantages of this. Secondly, Micron is focused most on the enterprise.

So having sorted that out we asked the busy storage veep a set of questions. His answers have been edited slightly for readability and brevity.

El Reg: What's Micron's attitude to flash software?

Glen Hawk: Software is clearly the next thing. Our best strategy is to work with our customers who have expertise in that area. So far it is not needed for our growth.

El Reg: What's Micron's attitude to NVMe?

Glen Hawk: That's clearly something worth pursuing. There are rival standards and we'll support whatever our customer base is interested in.

El Reg: What does Micron think of three-bits-per-cell (TLC) flash?

Glen Hawk: We do have a robust portfolio of TLC chips. Our strategy, with each lithography, we have SLC, MLC and TLC products. During different market cycles we'll run different products.

It's a tight market now and we reserve capacity for customers wanting SLC and MLC. We are capacity-constrained and can barely supply enough SLC and MLC SSDs. We don't anticipate offering any TLC SSDs in the foreseeable future.

El Reg: Talk about 128Gbit product please.

Glen Hawk: We currently have 20nm 128Gbit product in high-volume production. We're sampling 128Gbit product using 16nm lithography – the same product but shrunk. Micron is now aligning SSD development with the lithography cycle. We'll have a 16nm SSD in the first half of 2014.

Two years ago we changed our fundamental planar cell architecture to use a high K dielectric and metal gate structure. Both these things make it easier for us to continue to scale and so the 16nm lithography became possible.

El Reg: Will there be another planar lithography shrink or will you go 3D?

Glen Hawk: We're pursuing both paths for now. When we reach the cost crossover point of 3D technology depends partly on how many flash cells you can stack on one another.

(Note: Samsung, the number one NAND supplier, has just announced its volume production of vertically stacked 3D V-NAND using 128Gbit parts and three layers, eventually progressing to 24 layers, interconnected by Through-Silicon Vias (TSVs). Samsung does not say what the lithography is in its chip.)

El Reg: Who will integrate PCIe flash with servers, the sever manufacturers or somebody else?

Glen Hawk: We think the server manufacturers will integrate flash PCIe cards. HP, Dell, IBM, etc. service enterprise customers. But there is the existing retrofit market. We have to be multi-lingual.

I think it is inevitable that Fusion-io will focus more on software. Some of the OEMs will evolve too and the value chain will re-establish itself