In this video from the 2013 HPC User Forum, Jill Matzke from SGI presents an update on the HPC customer activities including the new Pangea supercomputer at Total.
Download the slides (PDF) or check out the HPC User Forum Video Gallery.
Video: SGI Update from HPC User Forum
Performance & Functionality Testbed for Clustered Filesystems at Bank of Italy
In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Giuseppe Bruno from the Bank of Italy presents: Performance & Functionality Testbed for Clustered Filesystems.
Download the slides (PDF) or check out more Lustre presentations in our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.
Video: Managing and Monitoring a Scalable Lustre Infrastructure
In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Makia Minich from Xyratex presents: Managing and Monitoring a Scalable Lustre Infrastructure. Download the slides (PDF) or check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.
During his talk, Makia mentions an excellent presentation from John West entitled What’s Missing from HPC.
Jeff Layton on Tools for Data Migration
Over at HPC Admin, Dell’s Jeff Layton writes that with today’s explosive data growth, at some point you will have to migrate data from one set of storage devices to another. To help move things along, he provides an overview of data migration tools.
At some point during this growth spurt, you will have to think about migrating your data from an old storage solution to a new one, but copying the data over isn’t as easy as it sounds. You would like to preserve the attributes of the data during the migration, including xattrs (extended attributes), and losing information such as file ownership or timestamps can cause havoc with projects. Plus, you have to pay attention to the same things for directories; they are just as important as the file themselves (remember that everything is a file in Linux). In this article, I wanted to present some possible tools for helping with data migration, and I covered just a few of them. However, I also wanted to take a few paragraphs to emphasize that you need to plan your data migration if you want to succeed.
As referred to in Layton’s article, this video from the Lustre User Group 2013 features Marc Stearman from LLNL presenting: Sequoia Data Migration Experiences. Download the slides (PDF).
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Video: Aeon Computing Showcases Intelligent Disk Arrays with Lustre and ZFS
In this video from the Lustre User Group 2013, Doug Johnson from Aeon Computing describes the company’s Hydra storage arrays that marry the speed of Lustre with the HA capabilities of ZFS.
The Hydra60 is a combination Lustre OSS (object storage server) and OST (object storage target) with two active/active failover nodes and shared storage in a single system chassis with an ultra dense 60 drive 6Gb SAS storage infrastructure. With a unified and zonable 6Gb SAS dual-ported backplane and drives the Hydra60 can sustain a remarkable performance while providing high-availability to volumes or object storage. With external interface options including FDR Infiniband, 40/10GbE 1Gb Ethernet and supporting Linux and Lustre releases 2.x the Hydra60 makes an excellent storage platform for Lustre performance with HA operation. The design of Hydra60 provides an affordable, redundant and resilient storage platform by leveraging RAIDZ thereby eliminating the cost of hardware RAID controller technology.”
For more on Lustre, check out our LUG 2013 Video Gallery.
Slidecast: ClusterStor 1500 Departmental Scale-Out Storage for HPC
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.
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Video: Software vs. Hardware RAID and Implications for the Future
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.
Video: Lessons Learned from the Blue Waters 1 Terabyte/sec File System
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.
Video: HPCS I/O Scenarios Update
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.
Video: High Availability in Lustre
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.
Video: Massive I/O Requirements for the SKA Telescope
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.
Video: EIOW Exascale I/O Working Group
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.
Penguin Computing Unveils Large-Scale Storage Platform
Penguin Computing has revealed its new Cloud CS Storage Platform that will utilize Scality’s RING Organic Storage software.
Performance, availability and scalability requirements of large scale cloud businesses cannot be met with traditional IT approaches to storage, that typically excel in one of these areas and fall short in another,” said Charles Wuischpard, CEO Penguin Computing. “To meet the demands of our customers that require storage solutions at the petabyte scale we based our large scale storage appliance Icebreaker CS on software from Scality. With its distributed no-shared architecture and its sophisticated Advanced Resilience Configuration, Scality RING offers excellent storage scalability and great availability without compromising performance.”
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SGI to Provide Massive Data Storage Capability for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder
This week SGI announced that iVEC and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have selected SGI to provide the massive data management infrastructure at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. The centre is part of the Australian Government Super Science Initiative to support the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio astronomy facility.
For decades, SGI has been solving Big Data challenges for researchers across science and industry in an effort to find answers to the world’s toughest challenges,” said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. “We are very pleased to support the data management needs of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. They are conducting impressive research, and with our InfiniteStorage and UV 2000 technology, will be able to reach results and interactions more quickly. We look forward to continuing this partnership and seeing the Pawsey Centre’s revolutionary solutions to challenges in science.”
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University of Bristol Creates Active Archive with Spectra Logic
The University of Bristol has selected a Spectra Logic tape library to accommodate up to 2PB of capacity for its data storage needs.
The university consists of a heavily virtualised environment, providing over 450 servers to back up in central services, and it needed to create an archive and migrate less time-critical data to a tape library in order to free up costly primary storage.
After considering its options, the university did a trial run for a few months with the Spectra T200 tape library and then selected the T680 version due to its larger capacity, with 42 rack units providing up to 2PB of compressed storage with the LTO-5 tape drive and media technology deployed in the library.
The library also used StorHouse software from FileTek to move the data from primary disk storage to the active tape archive so that the data held on the library is always readily available.
The T-680 includes the advanced security technology that initially attracted the university to Spectra’s solutions, namely integrated BlueScale Encryption to provide added AES-256 bit security for stored data and the Media Lifecycle Management feature. Media Lifecycle Management records more than 40 data points every time a tape is loaded, giving vital statistical and diagnostic information so that integrity of the data on the tapes can be ensured and easily managed.
Post installation, the University of Bristol is migrating data into its active archive to help offload the primary storage and to more efficiently manage backups. In addition, the extra capacity afforded by the tape libraries will enable the university to scale to multiple petabytes in the same footprint in the future.
This story appears here as part of a cross-publishing agreement with Scientific Computing World.
