Members of the GLOW consortium own and operate central storage and computational facilities that are dedicated to the radio astronomy community in Germany.
GLOW Cluster
The University of Bielefeld owns and operates a storage and compute cluster for recording and processing LOFAR and MeerKAT data. The cluster consists of two parts. For one that is used for GLOW mode observations, consisting of eight dedicated servers that are connected to the six German LOFAR stations via the GLOW network. And for the other an HPC part that consists of six high-memory nodes (two with GPU), with a Ceph shared filesystem, Slurm workload manager, and fast interconnect.
Technical details of the HPC part:
- 4 Quad-CPU nodes, each with 48 cores, 3TB memory
- 2 Dual-CPU nodes, each with 24 cores, 1.5TB memory, and 1 Tesla V100S-32
- 100 Gbps Infiniband network
- Ceph shared filesystem with 2 PB HDD storage capacity and 40 TB SSD scratch area
Access:
If you would like access to the cluster for your project, please write a mail to jkuensem [at] physik.uni-bielefeld.de with an ed25519 type SSH public key. Please also state the reason/project and affiliation. There is also a Mattermost channel (operated by MPIfR) for coordination with other users, which you can join.
Acknowledgements:
This cluster was set up and upgraded several times primarily with funding by the BMBF Verbundforschung. If you used this facility to process or store your data, please add a paragraph to the acknowledgements section of any resulting publication, e.g.:
We acknowledge data storage and computational facilities by the University of Bielefeld which are hosted by the Forschungszentrum Jülich and that were funded by German Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) projects D-LOFAR IV (05A17PBA) and D-MeerKAT-II (05A20PBA), as well as technical and operational support by BMBF projects D-LOFAR 2.0 (05A20PB1) and D-LOFAR-ERIC (05A23PB1), and German Research Foundation (DFG) project PUNCH4NFDI (460248186).
The LOFAR LTA (Long Term Archive)
The JSC at the Forschungszentrum Jülich is one of the three LOFAR LTA sites (next to PSNC in Poland and SURF in the Netherlands). It owns and operates dCache tiered storage facilities with significant disk and tape storage capacities, which is used by the ILT (International LOFAR Telescope) and the contained data can be accessed through the central ILT services. Some further information can be found here.