IBM has signed an agreement with the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation of Japan, known as KEK, to develop for the group the ‘KEK Central Computer System,’ a server and storage offering that will be used for space research.
The High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation is a national organisation that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in Japan, which is situated in Tsukuba of Ibaraki prefecture.
IBM said that KEK Central Computer System will be used by researchers to analyse data generated from experiments in elementary particle and atomic nuclear research, as well as data from synchrotron radiation, neutron and muon research. The system will also be used for theoretical calculations to develop new accelerators, said IBM. With the new KEK Central Computer System, all the data analytics systems will be integrated, it added.
The KEK System is expected to have over 370 highly scalable IBM iDataPlex systems that are capable of high-speed processing while consuming little power and taking up little space.
The organisation is expected to manage more than 10 petabytes of experiment data in the near future. IBM said it will develop a tiered storage environment that consists of the IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS), and the High Performance Storage System (HPSS).
The GPFS disk system provides up to 7 petabytes of data capacity and HPSS system will provide up to 16 petabytes of effective data capacity to accommodate future data increases, said IBM.
The company said it builds a framework that combines its IBM Systems Director system management software and the IBM Active Energy Manager to enable the organisation to set energy consumption limits via threshold values and monitor the consumption.
Domestic and international collaborative research institutions will use the new IBM system and storage offering to share resources and data, said IBM.
