The Institute for
Earth Observation is hosting the Sentinel Alpine Observatory and operating the
Receiving Station on the peak of Mount Renon.
Those services require
a state of the art data center consisting of storage, processing and networking
components.
Especially since the
ESA Copernicus program reached operational status with a number of Sentinel
series satellites in Orbit and constantly providing new data, the needs and
requirements for meaningful analysis have risen steeply.
Eurac Research and the
Institute of Earth Observation with the support of the I&CT Division of the
Scientific Network South Tyro, are now operating a storage backend in the
Petabyte scale. This Big Data storage is built on the CEPH open source project,
based on commodity hardware and highly scalable. Currently is providing more
than 1
Petabyte (1.000.000.000.000.000 byte)
of space, hosting the archive of
satellite imagery over South Tyrol and the complete Alpine Arc.In order to process and analyse all these
data it is necessary to have a computing facility next to them. The Institute for Earth Observation is
operating its own high performance computing cluster of more than 300 CPU cores
and just about 3 Terabytes of RAM. Additionally, access to Eurac Research
computing cluster, the EODC (Earth Observation Data Center, Vienna) and the
Vienna Scientific Cluster guarantee that even very extensive computations can
be performed.
Both the storage and
the processing cluster are interconnected through a backbone network of 2x40 Gb/s,
and a fast connection to the Internet is enabled at a 10 Gb/s, which allow a
fast and efficient access and handling of the data.
