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Initial Technical Specifications

last modified 09-09-2008 09:53

 

The basic technical specifications were defined at the end of 1993. A distinction was made between the:

High Speed Network

 

 

  • The data transfer rate between any beamline and the centralized computing facility had to be at least 20 Megabits/second,
  • the network had to be highly reliable,
  • it had to allow for a potentially large number of connections (100...200),
  • the industry support had to be guaranteed for at least 10 years, which implied the selection of an industry standard,
  • network interfaces for VME/VXI, EISA (HP, PC's) and S-Bus (SUN) had to exist,
  • support of TCP/IP and NFS,
  • a distance of up to 800 m, with an average of 400 to 500m, had to be covered

The ATM technology was selected as an answer to the above specifications (see also chapter: Technical choices and implementation).

  • Data Storage

    The user should see a large, homogenous storage space.

    • Fast on-line storage:
    • capacity of 100-200 GBytes (~10 days of data from phase 1 beamlines),
    • I/O speed of at least 4*20MegaBits/second,
    • easily extenable to larger capacities.

    The RAID technology was selected for fast on-line storage (see next chapter)

    • Slow on-line storage
      • capacity of 1-2 TeraBytes (~100 days of data from phase 1 beamlines),
      • maybe tape based but must be fully automated,
      • no data archiving,
      • management software must allow automatic migration of files between the fast and the slow storage systems.

    An initial implementation of a file migration facility was abondened after many problems.

    Graphics

    • For work places with 19" color screens,
    • 24 bit color planes,
    • display speed in excess of 25 MegaPixels/second,
    • the workstation RAM has to be large enough to store 50 images of 2 MegaBytes each,
    • Access to a 600 dpi color laser printer

    UNIX workstations were implemented in 8 different terminal rooms, but only one with a 24 bit color pane.

    CPU requirements

    • UNIX based
    • Floaring performance of ~1000 Mflops
    • Integer performance of ~1000 Mips
    • Management Software

    A UNIX computer cluster based on the HP PA-RISC 7100 processor was implemented.

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    European Synchrotron Radiation Facility