The Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) plans to install more tape storage to support its scientific research.

The US Department of Energy research lab in Batavia, Illinois, specializes in high-energy particle physics and is home to the 3.3 km-circumference Main Injector particle accelerator.

Fermi Forward Discovery Group (FFDG), which has managed the lab since the start of this year, said that the lab currently operates a tape storage infrastructure that includes three IBM TS4500 libraries (each with 10,000 slots) and two Spectra Logic TFinity libraries (each with 12,500 slots).

In a request for proposal, it said that it was seeking "an enterprise-class tape storage library with a minimum native capacity of 225PB and equipped with 20 tape drives."

It should support at least 40 tape drives.

The library will be installed at the lab's Grid Computing Center (GCC) data center, with a total usable area of 10ft wide by 30ft long.

Fermilab is currently building the Deep Underground Neutrino Experiment (DUNE), where trillions of neutrinos will be sent from the lab some 1,300 kilometers (807 miles) to a Liquid Argon Time Projection Chamber (LArTPC) at the Sanford Underground Research Facility.

The project has been hit by several delays and is set to cost more than $3 billion. When it comes online in the early 2030s, it is expected to produce vast quantities of scientific data.

The Fermilab also stores "a large portion" of the data produced by CERN’s High Luminosity Large Hadron Collider, with roughly 40 percent of the experiment’s data files stored on tape at the lab as of 2020.

The US government previously attempted to build its own large collider, with more than $2 billion sunk into the Superconducting Super Collider in the early 1990s.

While seventeen shafts were sunk and 23.5km (14.6 miles) of tunnel were bored, the project was canceled after Congress rejected further funding. The site was sold to Collider Data Center, an investment group led by Johnnie Bryan Hunt, in 2006.

Hunt, who founded the giant trucking business J.B. Hunt, had hoped to convert the site into a data center and a data storage site akin to Iron Mountain's Pennsylvania site.

However, after he died later that year after falling on ice, the project was quietly scrapped. The site was acquired by oilfield chemicals manufacturer Magnablend.