Staff: F. Bedosti, V. Galluzzi, M. Gandolfi, E. Gasperini, C. Gheller, M. Stagni, S. Tubertini, M. Tugnoli, A. Zanichelli
Collaborators: M. Nanni
INAF SID: M. Baldini, A. S. Cibelli, S. Giovannini, B. Neri
In the 80s the National Research Council (CNR) funded the project of a ‘computational facility’ specialized in signal and image processing at IRA. During the last decades the IRA Data Centre has provided many services to CNR Institutes and University Departments within the Emilia-Romagna Region, hosted servers from other Institutions, offered services to the Research Area of Bologna. Even after becoming part of INAF and leaving CNR, IRA has continued hosting and managing the network hardware and software services of the Research Area (still part of CNR), coordinating the main GARR NREN Point-Of-Presence Research Network node BO3.
IRA Data Center room
Since 2004 the Data Center has been hosting the organisational unit for the INAF Digital IT Services (SID), whose staff provides IT administration services at a national level managing hardware and software development as well as administrative applications.
In addition to the management of IRA core IT services, the Data Centre continues its activity as a specialized centre for radio astronomical data analysis by hosting and managing hardware and software resources made available to the research & technology staff. Moreover the Data Centre carry on its participation in the the integration and development of astronomical tools for scientific data analysis.
Among the computational resources hosted at the Data Centre it is worth mentioning the VLBI-IT software correlator as well as the cluster computing systems for the INAF Pleiadi e-infrastructure, the Italian ALMA Regional Centre, the LOFAR project and many others.
The Data Centre resources consist of more than 120 compute nodes with different configurations in terms of core number (from 4 up to 128) and memory (from 32 up to 1024 GB) according to the requirements of the various data analysis software applications. Total storage capacity amounts to approximately 1.5 PB. Network connection provided by GARR National Research & Education Network consists of two 10 Gbit links, one of which is dedicated to data transfer and processing at the VLBI-IT correlator for radio astronomical VLBI experiments.
IRA is contributing to the creation of a national INAF National Data Centre located at the new Tecnopolo infrastructure in Bologna, providing its long standing experience in running a Data Centre specialized in astronomical data analysis.
History of the IRA Data Centre in pictures.
Credits
Images: INAF-IRA