A distributed archive for the International LOFAR Telescope
LOFAR started its science operations in December 2012. Several tens to hundreds of Terabytes of data are produced day by day by the more than 50 LOFAR stations in Europe. Even after processing at the central processing facility of the International LOFAR Telescope (ILT) in Groningen, several Terabytes of data need to be stored in the archive each day. This task is shared by three computing centers in Europe: SURFsara in Amsterdam, the Forschungszentrum Jülich, and PSNC Poznan. Build upon the same technology, and connected to the same central catalog and retrieval system, they form the LOFAR Long-Term Archive (LTA).
The LTA site at the Forschungszentrum Jülich
The German share of the Long-Term-Archive is covered by the Jülich Supercomputing Centre, which provides as of 2015 a storage capacity of 290 Terabyte on disk and 6.4 Petabyte on tape. A growth rate of 2 Petabyte/year is planned. This allows fast and efficient access to LOFAR data for the international community of radio astronomers.