Fermilab recently reached a record 6 PB of data permanently recorded on tape. At the same time, data sent from the laboratory exceeded 2 PB – more than double the amount leaving three months earlier.
Traffic onto the site has been growing as the CMS experiment ramps up in preparation for the LHC at CERN – Fermilab is one of seven Tier-1 sites for CMS. Prior to a year ago, traffic never exceeded a quarter of a petabyte in a month. The increase in both outgoing and incoming data is attributable not only to CMS, but also to the collaborations on the DØ and CDF experiments at Fermilab actively moving data for analysis.
Although the amount of incoming and outgoing data is growing quickly, the computing division at Fermilab is keeping pace when it comes to infrastructure capacity. The external network capacity is currently 60 Gbit/s. If upgrades are necessary, the infrastructure is already in place to add capacity at a low marginal cost, using different wavelengths, through a metropolitan optical fibre network to the US Department of Energy's network interchanges in Chicago.
The volume of data sent from the Tier-1 Fermilab computing centre to Tier-2 sites continues to increase. The sites form part of the international Grid being constructed in readiness for the start-up of the LHC.