250 Petabytes of HDD’s Shredded – Alpine Storage System of Summit Supercomputer Dismantled
In the Summit Supercomputer’s last stage of life, over 32 000 drives are shredded.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) has decommissioned its Alpine Storage System, the storage system consisted of 250-petabytes of usable disk space (1024 terabytes = 1 petabyte) that held data for both the Summit supercomputer and its other supporting systems. These drives are being shredded pre-emptively; currently the world’s 9th fastest supercomputer, Summit will be officially retired on the 1st of November 2024.
Summit is being retired to make way for the Discovery system – a computer set to be the world’s fastest, with an estimated 8.5 exaFLOPS of performance. FLOPS is in reference to calculations it can perform per second. The math works out to 8.5 quintillion calculations every second. Summit was initially intended to be shut down in 2023, but its high productivity rates led local government departments to keep it in operation for another year. Unfortunately, its aging storage – which as never intended to operate for another year – couldn’t last as long.
Alpine was part of Oak ridge National Laboratories storage solution for Summit and its supporting systems, holding “scratch” data from the supercomputer and its external systems, which both pre- and post-process Summit’s calculations. In it’s prime, Alpine could achieve 2.2 TB/s random read and write speeds. However, in recent years, drive failure rates have it unacceptable levels. This is where the system to replace Aline comes in – Alpine2.
Data security is the primary reason why hard drives are shredded. It is the most efficient way to ensure no data can be gleaned from the physical disks in the hard drives. With the magnitude of the operation, the lab brought an outside vendor to shred the drives on site. The team dismantled the data servers in under two months thanks to the vendors industrial drive shredder, which could shred one drive every 10 seconds.
Paul Abston, group leader for HPC infrastructure at ORNL has this to say about data security, “Even though we’re not dealing with classified data, the data still belongs to the users, and we have a responsibility to make sure it’s protected. The teeth of the shredder tear the drives into tiny pieces, making it impossible to reconstruct into a functioning drive.”
