Managing the unprecedented amount of data that will soon stream from Rubin Observatory means more than buying tons of hard drives. SLAC scientist Richard Dubois explains what will go into Rubin’s U.S. data facility.

The camera will explore cosmic mysteries as part of the Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time.

Using a 5,000-mile network loop operated by ESnet, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory (SLAC) recently transferred 1 petabyte in 29 hours, with encryption and checksumming, beating last year's record by 5 hours, an almost 15 percent improvement.

As members of the lab’s Computer Science Division, they develop the tools needed to handle ginormous data volumes produced by the next generation of scientific discovery machines.