Profile

We are a small team of eight people at Diamond maintaining and developing all the computing systems, involved in data collection, analysis, data storage and running of the synchrotron (a type of particle accelerator).  Though being a small team I get to do a bit of everything, I specialise in the data storage systems.  A typical system my be between one to two petabytes.

If the average MP3 encoding for mobile is around 1MB per minute, and the average song lasts about four minutes, then a petabyte of songs would last over 2,000 years playing continuously.
If the average smartphone camera photo is 3MB in size and the average printed photo is 8.5 inches wide, then the assembled petabyte of photos placed side by side would be over 48,000 miles long – almost long enough to wrap around the equator twice.
One petabyte is enough to store the DNA of the entire population of the US – and then clone them, twice.

We also require this storage to record data at about 30 gigabytes per second for our fastest file system.

So if an average DVD is 4.7GB we are storing approximately 6.4 DVD films per second.  We have three and soon to be four of these file systems operational at Diamond.

Other than that there are about two thousand CPU cores in our clusters and a few hundred servers that we operate.

It might sound busy but a large part of our work is ensuring the system can look after itself allowing only eight people to run all of this.

Start … Coffee …. But I am fortunate that most of what I do is innovative, so I do not need to do much repetitive work.  I let computers do that as that is one thing they are very good at.  I do not have a typical day in many ways as every days problems are different.

One day I might be on a beamline (where the experiments take place) repairing at a detector server.  This is the device involved with looking at the sample much like you can take a picture with a digital camera but this can see X-Rays and can take a picture a hundred times a second.

Other days I may be involved with buying and testing the storage systems that will ensure Diamond will be able to store the experimental data in three years time.  Currently this is 30 gigabytes a second so 6.4 DVD’s a second but in three years this could double.

Or even writing software to gather statistics, automate repetitive tasks or software based tools.