Today Terascala announced that an HPC storage appliance managed by Terascala is simplifying Lustre file system management at Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC) facility. Available to the Virginia Tech research community, ARC’s mission is to advance computational science, engineering, and technology.
Terascala’s TeraOS HPC storage management software has been a part of the university’s flagship cluster, BlueRidge, since June of this year. The 400 Teraflop BlueRidge is a 408-node Cray CS-300 cluster with 6,528 cores and 27.3 TB of memory systemwide.
Terascala’s TeraOS provides a truly complete Lustre parallel file system solution,” explained Brian Marshall, computational scientist at Virginia Tech. “The hardware installation and setup were straightforward. The web dashboard provides real-time monitoring and management capabilities, easing the burden of administration.”
According to Marshall, the high performance storage appliance is an integral part of the BlueRidge cluster. “ARC uses Lustre as the parallel scratch filesystem for BlueRidge. Many distributed applications require a large, shared space to write temporary and checkpoint results. Without a high performance, parallel filesystem, file I/O to a single disk would create a crippling bottleneck, resulting in most processors idling. Terascala’s Lustre solution removes this bottleneck, allowing applications to take full advantage of the computational power available.”
The Terascala-managed HPC storage appliance works well, allowing Marshall and his team to focus on algorithms and other computational tasks instead of trouble-shooting file systems. “The system is a turnkey appliance that definitely simplifies file system administration,” continued Marshall. “It allows us to spend our time elsewhere–which is extremely valuable.”
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