ESO's ArchiveComputing framework

ESO's Science Archive is distributed across four different sites on two continents. With the huge amount of data produced by the various instruments this poses special requirements on the way data is transfered between the sites and distributed to the various subscribers. ESO's latest development, the Next Generation Archive System (NGAS), is based on cheap ATA disks connected to custom PCs running http based servers controlling the archiving process, supporting retrieval and checking the health status of the disks and the data itself. The current deployment of this system covers just a single 8kx8k pixel wide field imager, which is producing about 30 GB of raw data per night. The next generation of wide field telescopes/instruments VISTA/VISTACam and VST/OmegaCam will produce data rates well exceeding 500 GB and 125 GB during a single typical night, respectively. The total data rate of all ESO telescopes/instruments will grow to about 0.75 TB/night once VISTA is operational. The archiving of this data is essential, the next important step is to support not just only retrieval, but also flexible processing schemes of the data within the archive cluster directly.