The facility benefits from a 10 gigabit network that supports a parallel Panasas storage system and a highly virtualised computational system, which is used by scientists for Earth observation and climate modelling.

It was funded from the 2011 investment of £145 million in e-infrastructure by the UK government Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS).

Dr Peter Oliver at STFC explained how RAL used Gnodal GS-Series switches in the network deployment.

"The kit was on the ground in late February and the Gnodal network was installed pretty soon after that, with the Panasas storage kit arriving in early March. It took us six hours to have 4.5 petabytes of storage online from the time we put the first switch on," said Oliver.

"We are heavily invested in Avaya networks and Force10, but we chose Gnodal because we didn't want an IP-based network, which would have introduced delays and latency. This would have decreased the performance of the parallel storage."