Central Computing Facility Upgrades Shape Up
The central computing facilities at Fermilab are being upgraded in a multi-faceted project which includes a new building for central computing which will house a new large-scale scientific computer expanded VAX cluster, and farms of microprocessor-based parallel processing systems. Confidentiality must be kept on the LSSC at this time because the acquisition is between the evaluation and the award of the contract stages. However, the building which will house the LSSC and become the new home of Fermilab Central Computing Facilities is rapidily coming to completion and is visible for all to see. The overall cost of the project is $25 million dollars with about $9 million of that cost for the new building. Construction of the 74,000 sq ft, threestory building is scheduled for completion in the spring of 1988.
The first floor will house computing hardware, a user's area and tape vault which is capable of storing over 150,000 10-1/2-in. reel tapes. In addition to the present system of 10-1/2-in. reel 6250-bpi tapes which have become the "workhorse" of high-energy physics (HEP) data accumulation, the acquisition package of the LSSC has encouraged potential vendors to propose a complement of new data-storage systems which use more sophisticated technologies like tape cartridges and optical disks.
The second floor is dominated by the LSSC mainframes along with other CPU's, disk drives, and an area for maintenance. The third floor will house the Physics Research Equipment Pool (PREP) and three groups of Computing Department personnel who are currently housed on the 6th and 11th floors of Wilson Hall.
The Central Computing Upgrade Project represents a statement about the magnitude of the future computing needs of the Fermilab HEP community, and is a major step towards meeting those needs. Now that fixed-target and colliding-beams experiments are accumulating higher and higher statistics data samples, the computing demand is impossible to meet with the existing computing systems. The fact that there is no room available in Wilson Hall to add more equipment further complicates the problem. The upgrade of the Central Computing Facilities, with both a new LSSC and new building to house the computing engine and personnel who service it, is a positive statement about the Department of Energy's and Fermilab's commitment to provide the resources required to do today's high-energy physics experiments.