Staff: F. Bedosti, G.Giovannini, M. Nanni, B. Neri, M. Stagni, F. Tinarelli, S. Tubertini, M. Tugnoli,
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, has offered services to the Research Area of Bologna, and 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), nonetheless coordinating the main GARR NREN Point-Of-Presence Research Network node BO3.
IRA Data Center room
In 2004 within our data center it was established the organi zational unit CED (Centre of Data Processing) for INAF. CED provides the national institution with IT administration services managing hardware and software development and administrative applications.
At present the data centre manages IRA core IT services and has kept its original mission by specializing in radioastronomical data analysis hosting hardware and providing software to the researchers. Moreover IRA has taken active part in the development of astronomical analysis tools. A VLBI software correlator, ALMA regional centre and LOFAR clusters and a number of other research projects are also hosted at the facility.
The data centre resources are now more than 50 compute nodes. Their resources span from 4 up to 128 cores and from 32 up to 512 GB of memory according to the requirements of the data analysis software. Total storage available is approximately 1 PB. Network connection provided by GARR NREN are two 10 Gbit links, one dedicated to VLBI experiments data transfers and data processing at the VLBI correlator.
IRA is already contributing to the creation of a unified National Data Centre of INAF at the brand new facility of ‘Tecnopolo’ in Bologna providing its decades of experience in running a data center specialized in astronomical data analysis.
The history of the data center in pictures
Credits
Images by: INAF-IRA