Short and Medium Term Evolution

All areas of NICE will continue to evolve at a rapid pace. This page is split into two parts, the first concerning the planned evolution during the year 2006 and the second part concerning the foreseeable evolution over the next three years (an eternity in computing).

Evolution of NICE in the year 2006:

• Tuning
  The storage systems and the client workstations/PCs on the beamlines need to be tuned for optimum performance.
• Network
  Generalization of Gigabit Ethernet on the client workstations/PCs. Upgrade of Site Internet connection from 100 Mbps to 1000 Mbps.
• Storage
  At least twice the storage capacity from currently 110 to 210 TeraBytes to keep pace with the data production. Purchase of additional LTO-FC tape drives to prepare for the next storage extension.
• Compute Cluster
  Installation of an additional batch of AMD-Opteron computers for data analysis.
• I/O workstations
  Review of all I/O workstation peripherals. Support for USB-2 storage devices (memory keys, USB disks).

Evolution over the next three years:

• Gridify parts or the totality of NICE
• Network
  10-Gigabit host to server connections on monomode fiber optics for demanding beamlines. Gigabit trunking on high performance NAS systems.
• Storage
  Low cost, high capacity disk systems. Investigation of Hierarchical Storage Management for very large data storage. High performance storage systems with performances of >200MB/s. Distributed File System (DFS). Storage virtualisation, global name space. Parallelised backup for large filesystems.
• Compute Clusters
  Massively parallel LINUX cluster (128 nodes) for image processing.