Kyoto University is one of the leading universities in Japan. It also has the distinction of having its own super computer.
The computer system is administered by HP Enterprise systems. HP is a US based computers company that makes computers, servers, and other computing equipment. The super computer at Kyoto University has been made by HP Japan.
Between December 14 and 16, the back up system of the super computer malfunctioned (did not work as it should have). Because of this, the data of the university was permanently deleted instead of being backed up. HP Japan has taken full responsibility for the incident.
Initially, the University thought that about 100 TerraByte (TB) (1 TB is 1,000,000 – a million MegaBytes) of data was permanently lost. Later, after some retrieval efforts, about 77TB of data was found to be lost forever.
Researchers who have lost their data have been informed by email. But the university has not released details of the kind of data that has been lost.
What is the real loss?
There are two important losses here. The first is the loss of research data itself. A lot of resources go into conducting research. Super computers are not used for day to day work. The kind of research that utilises the computing power of a super computer is usually very important. All of that information gone means that perhaps months of work is now gone and will either have to be done again or completely abandoned (given up). All the time of those researchers, all their findings, if they are in the permanently deleted files, will need to be done again.
The second loss is more directly financial. Super computers are expensive to operate. A loss of this data means that the same amount of time will need to be spent again to recreate the models. The operating expense will have to be borne twice by the university.