Practical Experiences

The European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) is a high-energy particle physics laboratory based at a site shared between France and Switzerland, near Geneva. Altogether, an average of 4,000 staff and visitors are on site, using a lot of data currently about 80 terabytes (Tbytes) and a lot of computing power currently about 5,000 workstations of many types. Efforts have been made by CERN’s Computing and Networks Division (CN) to contain the growth in manpower requirements for manipulating data on tapes and cartridges. Initially, this involved making the manual arrangements as efficient as possible, but recent efforts have been directed toward trying to make use of automatic libraries. Beginning with a large protoope Haushahn system, we have now installed two IBM 3495 L50s, an Exabyte 120, an IGM-ATL, and an IBM 3494. Each of these machines has had both excellent and deplorable features, and each has provoked serious problems when exposed to the user community. Not all of these difficulties were expected, and some seem unlikely to be remedied. However, some may be avoidable.