Entries filed under “HPC Hardware”

Hardware news and announcements in technologies related to HPC.

Slidecast: ClusterStor 1500 Departmental Scale-Out Storage for HPC

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 9, 2013

In this slidecast, Ken Claffey from Xyratex describes the company’s new ClusterStor 1500 storage system. Designed for scale-out HPC storage solutions, the ClusterStor 1500 delivers HPC performance and efficiency with help from the Lustre file system.

Departments within larger organizations or medium-sized enterprises today, especially in the commercial, academic and government sectors, represent an underserved market. They need high-performance and scalable storage solutions that are cost-efficient, easy to deploy and manage and reliable even under heavy workloads,” said Ken Claffey, senior vice president of the ClusterStor business at Xyratex. “Growth in this market segment is being driven by the increasing adoption of simulation applications in a wide range of industries from car and aircraft design to chemical interactions and financial modeling. Traditional enterprise storage systems are simply not designed to meet the performance needs of these applications, so we engineered and built the affordable and modular ClusterStor 1500 to bring the performance power of Lustre to this underserved and growing market in the way that only ClusterStor can.”

With the ability to scale performance from 1.25GB/s to 110GB/s and raw capacity from 42TB to 7.3PB, ClusterStor 1500 is purpose-built to satisfy data intensive department level compute cluster needs, ClusterStor 1500 is designed to provide best in class scale-out storage for middle tier high performance computing environments. The ClusterStor 1500 solution features scale-out storage building blocks, the Lustre parallel filesystem and a comprehensive management platform that eliminates the guesswork usually associated with building and optimizing your own HPC storage solution.

Read the Full Story * View the slides * Download the MP3 * Subscribe on iTunes * Subscribe to RSS

Also posted in HPC, HPC Software, Lustre, Podcast, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Durham Cluster Allows Researchers to Reach for the Stars

By Staff | Published May 9, 2013

A high-performance server cluster is enabling researchers at the Institute for Computational Cosmology (ICC), based at Durham University and throughout the wider UK astrophysics community, to better understand the universe by allowing them to model phenomena ranging from solar flares to the formation of galaxies.

The cluster is part of the DiRAC (Distributed Research using Advanced Computing) national facility. As such, members of the UKMHD consortium, ICC members and their national and international collaborators also use the cluster. In total, the cluster is used by researchers at universities in the UK including Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, St Andrews, Sussex and Warwick, and from abroad by people in Australia, China, Germany and the Netherlands.

The cluster is known as The Cosmology Machine (Cosma) and is a combination of Cosma5, a new IBM and DDN technology infrastructure integrated with Durham University’s existing cluster, Cosma4 (originally installed in January 2011).

Boosted by new infrastructure, Cosma now has 9,856 CPU cores and 4,096 GPU cores. It includes 71,000 Gigabytes (GB) of RAM and the peak performance of the system is 182T/Flops. Cosma has 3.5 petabytes of storage for the data produced by cosmology applications.

The server cluster and storage has been designed, built, installed and will be supported by Durham University’s data processing, data management and storage partner, OCF.

This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.

Also posted in Compute, GPUs, HPC, New Installations | Leave a comment

Video: Software vs. Hardware RAID and Implications for the Future

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 9, 2013

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Alan Poston from Xyratex presents: Software vs. Hardware RAID and Implications for the Future.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Software, LUG, Lustre, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Nvidia’s Bill Dally on Future Challenges of Large-Scale Computing

By Ralph | Published May 8, 2013

Scientific Computing is featuring an interview with Bill Dally, Nvidia’s Chief Scientist and Senior Vice President of Research. Dally will keynote ISC’13 with a talk entitled “Future Challenges of Large-Scale Computing.”

The biggest impediment to innovation is legacy software. Many innovations are held back by the need for backward compatibility — or by the excessive focus on yesterday’s software at the expense of tomorrow’s software. To address this challenge, at the same time we develop new architectures and software techniques, we work to develop a path for legacy software to migrate to the new architecture.

Read the Full Story.

Also posted in Events, GPUs, HPC, ISC13 | Leave a comment

Video: Lessons Learned from the Blue Waters 1 Terabyte/sec File System

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 8, 2013

Now that the deployment of the 1 Terabyte/sec file system at Blue Waters has been completed, what comes next? In this video from the Xyratex Blog, John Fragalla, principal solutions architect at Xyratex, discusses the value that ClusterStor brings to the HPC market and what the company has learned from designing and deploying ClusterStor solutions.

Also posted in Business of HPC, HPC, HPC Software, Lustre, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Video: HPCS I/O Scenarios Update

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 7, 2013

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, John Carrier from Cray presents: HPCS I/O Scenarios Update.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Software, LUG, Lustre, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Air-Cooling Cascade with the New Cray XC30-AC Supercomputer

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 7, 2013

Today Cray introduced the Cray XC30-AC supercomputer as an air-cooled addition to its series of Cray XC30 (Cascade) systems. Shipping now, the new Cray XC30-AC supercomputer includes all of the advanced HPC technologies offered in the Cray XC30 system, and features aggressive price points intended to attract a new a class of HPC users – the technical enterprise.

Innovation is not limited to Fortune 100 companies. There are many Fortune 1000 companies, and even departments within Fortune 100 companies, with a growing need for a supercomputing system that provides a critical tool for taking advantage of performing complex simulations,” said Peg Williams, Cray’s senior vice president of high performance computing systems. “With all of the features and functionality of our high-end Cray XC30 systems, our new Cray XC30- AC supercomputer is perfectly suited for technical enterprise customers, giving them the ability to leverage all of the world-class computational resources of a Cray supercomputer at much lower starting price points.”

In case you’re wondering, the Cray XC30-AC does not incorporate Appro technology. Cray acquired Appro late last year, and that company was known for its innovative system cooling.

With prices starting at $500,000, the Cray XC30-AC does feature the same key traits of the Cray XC30 system – the Aries system interconnect and the Cray Linux Environment. The system has ability to handle a wide variety of processor types, including Intel Xeon processors, Intel Xeon Phi coprocessors, and NVIDIA Tesla GPU accelerators.

Read the Full Story or check out the related post by Jay Gould over at the Cray Blog.

Also posted in Compute, HPC | Leave a comment

Video: High Availability in Lustre

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 6, 2013

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, John Fragalla from Xyratex presents: High Availability in Lustre.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Software, LUG, Lustre, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Video: Massive I/O Requirements for the SKA Telescope

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 6, 2013

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Bill Boas from Cray presents: Massive I/O Requirements for the SKA Telescope.

Processing the vast quantities of data produced by the SKA will require very high performance central supercomputers capable of 100 petaflops per second processing power. This is about 50 times more powerful than the most powerful supercomputer in 2010 and equivalent to the processing power of about one hundred million PCs.

Download the slides (PDF) or check out more OFA videos in our Open Fabrics Worshop Video Gallery.

Also posted in Computing Research, Events, HPC, Network, Open Fabrics Workshop, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

Upgrading the Grid for the LHC

By Ralph | Published May 6, 2013

Over at International Science Grid This Week, Katie Kahlie writes that the current maintenance hiatus for the Large Hadron Collider provides a window to upgrade one of the most ambitious data grids on the planet.

The challenges for the Grid were three-fold. The main one was to understand how best to manage the LHC data and use the Grid’s heterogeneous environment in a way that physicists could concern themselves with analysis without needing to know where their data were. A distributed system is more complex and demanding to master than the usual batch-processing farms, so the physicists required continuous education on how to use the system. The Grid needs to be fully operational at all times (24/7, 365 days/year) and should “never sleep”, meaning that important upgrades of the Grid middleware in all data centres must be done on a regular basis. For the latter, the success can be attributed in part to the excellent quality of the middleware itself (supplied by various common projects, such as WLCG/EGEE/EMI in Europe and OSG in the US, see box) and to the administrators of the computing centres (coordinated by EGI in Europe and OSG in North America), who keep the computing fabric running continuously.

Read the Full Story.


Also posted in Computing Research, HPC, Network | Leave a comment

Video: EIOW Exascale I/O Working Group

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 5, 2013

In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Meghan McClelland from Xyratex presents: EIOW – Exascale I/O Working Group.

There is a fierce competition on the storage market to offer the best performing devices, with great management at a low price. The EIOW group, from the outset, decided that it would not attempt to offer an end-to-end solution, which would necessarily involve competing instead of working with storage providers. The focus of EIOW is on middleware to provide, for example, schemas describing data structure and layout, novel access methods to data for applications, a uniform data management infrastructure and a framework for the implementation of layered I/O software, similar in spirit to HDF5 as a specialized use of a parallel file system. We decided EIOW should be open, and have interfaces to layer on lower level storage infrastructure such as object stores, databases and file systems as provided by storage providers, to allow their expertise and leadership in this area to continue to benefit the HPC community.

Download the EIOW whitepaper and slides, or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.

Also posted in Events, Exascale, HPC, HPC Software, LUG, Lustre, Storage, Video | Leave a comment

RDMA and Storage at a Distance

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 5, 2013

Over at Forbes, Tom Coughlin writes that RDMA extends the capability of fast direct access to memory between computers in a cluster to greater distances, within a Metropolitan Area Network (MAN ) or even in a Wide Area Network (WAN) that can span continents.

RDMA over a WAN allows some very useful capabilities that can increase the overall power of a clustered computer system. It can provide remote collaboration with a remote file system allowing access as though it were local, enabling apparent real-time collaboration. RDMA also allows very efficient file transfer over a WAN. This direct data placement is accomplished with little impact on the processors on either end of the file transport. These features are very useful for working with large data files such as those common in many HPC applications. Storage at a Distance will not directly impact conventional client computing since these devices typically don’t have access to dedicated high-speed Internet connections. However with the growth of on-line (cloud) services the use of RDMA could accelerate many background processes within a given data center and between data centers. This could improve overall cloud performance and provide services such as fast backups and replications of data to provide data recovery. Thus Storage at a Distance could have a great impact on the overall performance and capabilities available over the Cloud.

Read the Full Story or see Coughlin’s recent Open Fabrics presentation over at inside-Cloud.


Also posted in Events, HPC, Network, Open Fabrics Workshop, RDMA | Leave a comment

Video: Infinetics – Innovative Topologies

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 3, 2013

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Harry Quackenboss and Ratko Tomic from Infinetics present: Innovative Topologies.

We have invented a unique approach to building a fabric across a large number of Ethernet switches, and built a comprehensive technology platform based on this Flexible Radix Switching (FRS) technique. This innovation enables transparent integration with existing data center solutions and big improvements to networks supporting cloud, virtualization, and big data applications. These data center network solutions are superior in terms of cost, performance, robustness and ease of use.

Download the slides (PDF). You can check out more OFA videos at our Open Fabrics Workshop Video Gallery.

Also posted in Cloud HPC, Events, HPC, Network, Open Fabrics Workshop, Video | Leave a comment

Intel MPI Library for Intel Xeon Phi-based Clusters & MVAPICH2 for Intel MIC

By Rich Brueckner | Published May 2, 2013

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Bill Magro from Intel presents: Intel MPI Library: Implementation for Intel Xeon Phi Based Clusters. Download the slides (PDF).

In this follow-up session, DK Panda from Ohio State University presents: MVAPICH2 for Intel MIC.

You can check out more OFA videos at our Open Fabrics Workshop Video Gallery.

Also posted in Co-processors, Events, HPC, HPC Software, InfiniBand, MPI, Network, Open Fabrics Workshop, Video | Leave a comment

Video: Network Direct v2 and WinOFED

By Rich Brueckner | Published April 30, 2013

In this video from the 2013 Open Fabrics Developer Workshop, Fab Tillier from Microsoft presents: Network Direct v2 and WinOFED.

You can check out more OFA videos at our Open Fabrics Workshop Video Gallery.

Also posted in Events, HPC, HPC Software, InfiniBand, Network, Open Fabrics, Open Fabrics Workshop, Video | Leave a comment

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