A university has seen how all the information it had has disappeared due to a problem in its highly advanced computer.
We trust technology a lot but if something goes wrong we can mess it up. They have learned this lesson in Japan today. Kyoto University has lost 77 TB of valuable information because the supercomputer in which they had it stored has had a failure.
This information belonged to 14 different research teams, with a total of 34 million files. Although there have been efforts by the university to get them back, various task forces have seen all lost progress.
The error has occurred in the backup procedure. Many devices have it, but in this case, the system has corrupted the files beyond recovery.
The procedure has been stopped for safety. Now they say they plan an upgrade system to prevent this from happening again.
It has also been thought an incremental backup procedureIn other words, they only copy back files modified since the last time the backup was started.
It is planned to be ready by January 2022 so that the investigations can continue as soon as possible. It is not well known what investigations have been lost because the university has not given more information.
What we do know is that she is known for her work in biology and pharmacology. In fact, Fugaku belongs to this university, the most powerful computer in the world that has been dedicated to research on COVID-19.
The machines are also wrong and it is not profitable
This failure in the backup it’s been really troublesome. Not only because of the amount of information that has been lost, greatly delaying the results of important research, but also because of the cost it entails on a financial level.
This Hewlett Packard supercomputer requires an amount of power and maintenance that costs several hundred dollars every hour that it is in operation.