Case Study: SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory achieves 4x faster data acquisition with Samsung 840 Pro SSDs

Samsung Solid State Drives Speed Scientific Discovery

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory needed to boost the data-acquisition performance of its Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) so more scientists could run experiments without losing valuable data. To solve read–write contention and slow HDD performance in the online cache, SLAC turned to Samsung and its SSD technology, specifically the Samsung 256GB 2.5-inch SSD 840 Pro Series.

Samsung supplied and SLAC deployed 100 of the Samsung 256GB 2.5-inch SSD 840 Pro drives as an online cache, removing mechanical spindle bottlenecks and separating reads from writes. The upgrade increased throughput from 2 GB/s to 8 GB/s (a 4× improvement) without adding nodes, eliminated multicast packet loss, and enabled higher experiment throughput, better use of beam time, and future scaling for larger detectors.

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Amedeo Perazzo

Photon Controls and Data Systems Department