Distributed Computing for FTU Data Handling

The growth of data warehouse in tokamak experiment is leading fusion laboratories to provide new IT solutions in data handling. In the last three years, the Frascati Tokamak Upgrade (FTU) experimental database was migrated from IBM-mainframe to Unix distributed computing environment. The migration efforts have taken into account the following items: (1) a new data storage solution based on storage area network over fibre channel; (2) andrew file system (AFS) for wide area network file sharing; (3) ‘one measure/one file’ philosophy replacing ‘one shot/one file’ to provide a faster read/write data access; (4) more powerful services, such as AFS, corba and MDSplus to allow users to access FTU database from different clients, regardless their O.S.; (5) large availability of data analysis tools, from the locally developed utility show to the multi-platform Matlab, interactive data language and jScope (all these tools are now able to access also the Joint European Torus data, in the framework of the remote data access activity); (6) a batch-computing cluster of Alpha/CompaqTru64 CPU based on CODINE/GRD to optimize utilization of software and hardware resources.