Fermilab lacks long-term plan to archive Tevatron data

Nature : When Fermilab’s Tevatron particle accelerator shuts down in September it will have collected a staggering 20 petabytes of data. But, as Eugenie Samuel Reich of Nature reports, Fermilab is only now developing plans for preserving that data hoard and for making it available to future researchers. The archival challenge is exacerbated by the impending diversion of computational resources away from the Tevatron’s two principal experiments D0 and CDF. What’s more, some of the oldest data from the Tevatron’s 26-year lifespan reside on old magnetic tapes. Historically, particle physicists have been less ready than astronomers to archive data, but that situation is changing. In contrast to Fermilab, CERN developed an archive plan for the LHC before the accelerator came on line in 2009.