The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) reported the destruction of some components of the Summit supercomputer. ORNL ran 32,000 Alpine storage system hard drives containing 250 petabytes of data through a shredder.

The Alpine system consists of 40 cabinets that occupy 130 square meters. m of Maidan. 32494 hard drives were extracted one at a time. The hard drives are 10 TB NL-SAS systems consisting of 77 IBM Elastic Storage Server (ESS) nodes.

“It’s hard to find a place that has more hard drives than we have, except maybe Amazon, Google or Microsoft. So taking Alpine apart is a big job, and of course security and data protection is the number one priority,” said Paul Ebston, group leader for infrastructure operations at ORNL’s National Computational Science Center.

The ShredPro Secure mobile shredder used for this task is capable of shredding one hard drive every 10 seconds.

“It’s very similar to a wood chipper. The teeth tear the discs into small pieces, after which restoration to a working disc is impossible, – clarifies Ebston. “Although we are not dealing with classified data, the information on the drives belongs to the users, and we are responsible for ensuring that the data is protected.”

After grinding the discs, the conveyor belt collects the waste and puts it in a container, after which it goes to recycling.

“When we recycle any metal objects, the money goes back into ORNL’s budget. Thus, it is not only an environmentally friendly, but also an economical approach,” Ebston says.

According to Ebston, the last time ORNL conducted such a disposal was in 2019, when the Atlas storage system was decommissioned. Atlas contained about 20,000 hard drives, and it took nine months to complete its disposal.

The disposal of Summit components is one of the stages of preparation for the transition to the Discovery supercomputer with a performance of 8.5 exaflops. Discovery is expected to launch no earlier than 2027.

The Summit supercomputer will be decommissioned in November this year. He worked for almost six years. Summit was scheduled to be decommissioned in early 2024, but thanks to the SummitPLUS initiative, its deadline was extended by almost a year. It is noted that the supercomputer has demonstrated outstanding performance, providing scientists around the world with more than 200 million hours of computing nodes. In 2020, ORN opened the Summit supercomputer’s hall and infrastructure for a virtual tour.

On November 19, Summit’s second storage system, Alpine2, will be read-only and then reconfigured as nearline storage (NLS). Alpine2 is scheduled to be completely decommissioned by the end of January next year.