Computing for an SSC experiment
I. Gaines · Bulletin of the American Physical Society · 1993
The hardware and software problems for SSC experiments are similar to those faced by present day experiments but larger in scale. In particular, the Solenoidal Detector Collaboration (SDC) anticipates the need for close to 10**6 MIPS of off-line computing and will produce several Petabytes (10**15 bytes) of data per year. Software contributions will be made from large numbers of highly geographically dispersed physicists. Hardware and software architectures to meet these needs have been designed. Providing the requisites amount of computing power and providing tools to allow cooperative software development using extensions of existing techniques look achievable. The major challenges will be to provide efficient methods of accessing and manipulating the enormous quantities of data that will be produced at the SSC, and to enforce the use of software engineering tools that will ensure the {open_quotes}correctness{close_quotes} of experiment critical software.