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The machine speeds up electrons to near light speeds so that they give off a light 10 billion times brighter than the sun. These bright beams are then directed off into laboratories known as 'beamlines'. Here, scientists use the light to study a vast range of subject matter, from new medicines and treatments for disease to innovative engineering and cutting-edge technology.

Whether fragments of ancient paintings or unknown virus structures, at the synchrotron, scientists can study their samples using a machine that is 10,000 times more powerful than a traditional microscope. Giant magneto-resistance (GMR), the phenomenon behind portable mp3 players, was studied using synchrotrons. The anti-flu drug Tamiflu was developed using synchrotron based research, and the structures of many proteins, viruses and vaccines were successfully mapped using synchrotron light. Synchrotrons have also been used to monitor the air at Ground Zero following the attacks on the World Trade Centre, to study the degradation of the Dead Sea scrolls, and to provide a window into our atomic and molecular world.

The research at Diamond Light Source is both academic and industry-based and covers a wide range of scientific disciplines. The facility is free at the point of access as long as results are published in the public domain. At Diamond Light Source, scientists can use synchrotron light for a vast range of applications, from exploring the conditions at the centre of the earth to developing vaccines and new drugs.

One of Diamond's areas of research is cancer, with exploration into the structure of cell molecules that could fight cancer. In the past this type of research, in which images are gradually built up to reveal the molecular structure, took eight hours to capture a single image. At Diamond Light Source these processes have been reduced to fractions of a second.

RUNNING INTO THE BUFFERS
Given the nature of its work, computing at Diamond Light Source is by necessity extremely processor and storage intensive in order to analyse and store data from the beamlines. To achieve the required computing capacity, Diamond provides a general-purpose compute cluster of approximately 1,900 compute cores and 250,000 GPU cores, which is also used for automated fast data processing on beamlines.

The amounts of data generated from beamline research are so enormous that Diamond Light Source stores the data on tape systems because it's not considered cost-effective to keep the data on disks forever, utilising the 2PB of high-performance storage most efficiently. Diamond Light Source aims to keep data on disk for approximately six months from time of collection. That said, the organisation has a data dispenser that permits clients to download their data onto disks and take it back to their home institution.

Each beamline at Diamond Light Source is optimised for a specific technique. However, the synchrotron wanted to implement a high-speed data buffer for data coming off two beamlines so it could be stored locally before being transferred to the central high-performance file system.

CACHE ON DELIVERY
Dave Bond, computer systems administrator at Diamond Light Source, says, "We had a need for high-speed IOPS for a buffer system that could handle the amount of data coming off the beamlines. In short, we wanted something that would provide a cache between our fast detectors on the beamline and our central storage." Diamond was already using a NetApp FAS system for scalable storage for unstructured scientific data and its virtual environment. Although this was answering a different storage need, its capability and flexibility led Diamond to explore NetApp technologies, among others, for a high-speed data buffer.

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