About the LSDF

What is the Large Scale Data Facility

The Large Scale Data Facility at the Steinbuch Centre for Computing (SCC) offers storage services for scientists, scientific projects and institutes in the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg. Access to the facility ranges from common standardised protocols to special purpose or novel methods for offering to intelligent storage. The storage is intimately coupled to a high speed computing cluster and connects to several HPC clusters for easy analysis.

Read the mission of the LSDF

LSDF for scientific users and "Big Data"

Data becomes more important in science and society every day. Experiments, instruments and measurements all produce massive amounts of data, 24 hours per day. Transforming it into scientific information and later to general knowledge needs services and facilities to manage, archive, explore and analyze this valuable information for the years to come. Investing all efforts to deliver state-of-the-art solutions for handling massive amounts of scientific data is therefore a key technology enabler for the society of the 21st century.

The LSDF recognises the importance of derived data for future science. Measurement data of empirical science quickly grows to PetaByte scale. These large amounts of data can only be efficiently stored, processed and retrieved by an infra structure dedicated for data intensive computing. The LSDF also offers secure internet access to data for exchange between partners and long time archival of data for reference. The computing environment of the LSDF is already successfully used for storage and analysis of images from High Throughput Microscopy and Light Sheet Microscopy projects of the [Institute of Toxicology and Genetics]. The LSDF builds on the extensive [LHC] data handling experience gained with [GridKa], the German WLCG Tier 1 centre.

LSDF for users and institutes in the State of BadenWuerttemberg

Reliable and secure storage that enables sharing and offers direct access to central computing facilities in various Universities in the State of Baden-Wuerttemberg is offered with the bwSync&Share and bwFileStorage services. Access is authenticated via the state wide single login service based on Shibboleth.

Collaborations

The [Institute for Data Processing and Electronics (IPE)] is developing software for scientific workflows and for meta data support which will eventually allow different scientific disciplines and sources to interact with the data in similar ways. Graphical user interfaces as well as application programming interfaces will hide the complexity of the attached data storage and access technologies and will provide secure and efficient access worldwide. To enable high data throughput processing frequently required data workflows will be optimized running on the LSDF analysis farm.

Image processing will benefit from the research at the [Institute of Applied Computer Science (IAI)]. The IAI will extend existing image processing filter cascades to autonomously identify and quantify heterogeneous structures in different types of microscopic images, e.g. for the mapping between fluorescence and brightfield channels. The main focus of the new algorithms is the handling of 3D information for correlative microscopy requiring information fusion between different 3D models derived from confocal microscopy, TEM, and X-Ray microscopy with different scales. Possible approaches are the detection of existing landmarks or the use of markers.

Publications and Marketing documents

Highres LSDF logo (copyright KIT)