CNAF against COVID-19

CNAF against COVID-19 CNAF is in the front lines against COVID-19: one of the major European computing and data instrastructure, Advanced Cloud solutions and IT skills of its staff have been made available to research in this field. In particular, CNAF partecipates or coordinates different initiatives: the European project EXSCALATE4CoV, that aims to identify inhibiting drugs for Coronavirus among already tested molecules and other 500 million ones. In this context, CNAF provides a data archiving system and will also make part of its computing resources available. the initiative INFN/R4I – Protein Folding shared with Sibylla Biotech, that aims to identify the intermediate states of protein ACE2 involved in the spread […]

Storage at CNAF looks ahead

Storage at CNAF looks ahead In order to satisfy the recent requirements of growing space to store data of scientific experiments and of a better data rate, CNAF acquired a new tape library. It is an IBM TS4500, equipped with 19 last generation enterprise tape drives, namely TS1160, each of them can reach a data rate of 400 MB/s both for reading and writing, to reach a total data rate of 7.6 GB/s, added to the 4 GB/s available on the other installed tape library, an Oracle StorageTek SL8500, so that the overall data rate capacity is 11.6 GB/s to and from tape. The new library has a modular structure […]

Towards service reactivation

Work is ongoing to reactivate the services of the CNAF Tier-1 data center. Right now an electrical line has been activated and since January 15th an UPS apparatus is working to cover up to 300 kW (of the overall 1.2 MW power needed by the whole data center). In this way, it is finally possible to restart some services. The recovery activity from the disks corrupted as a result of the flood occurred on last November 9th has been started. Data will be put on new disks. The cleaning activity of the tape library is almost complete. On January 17th the vendor will start the re-certification phase. In the meanwhile, […]

Datacenter temporarely down

On November 9th 2017, CNAF datacenter was flooded due to a broken waterworks pipe in a nearby street. Despite the waterproof doors, the water managed to enter the rooms of the data centers, seriously damaging electronic appliances, servers and storage equipment. We are working hard to restore the center as soon as possible. All INFN- National services and all Information systems applications are temporarily hosted at the Institute of Radioastronomy at CNR in Bologna, and are working. Several weeks are still needed for a complete recovery of the center.