NSF Funds $10 Million for ‘Expanse’ Supercomputer at SDSC

SDSC has been awarded a five-year grant from the NSF valued at $10 million to deploy Expanse, a new supercomputer designed to advance research that is increasingly dependent upon heterogeneous and distributed resources. “As a standalone system, Expanse represents a substantial increase in the performance and throughput compared to our highly successful, NSF-funded Comet supercomputer. But with innovations in cloud integration and composable systems, as well as continued support for science gateways and distributed computing via the Open Science Grid, Expanse will allow researchers to push the boundaries of computing and answer questions previously not possible.”

LANL Looks to Aeon Computing for Lustre

Today Aeon Computing announced that the company will provide two Lustre file systems to enhance LANL’s technical and supercomputing capabilities in support of its national security mission. Each of the two Lustre file systems provide 14 Petabytes of data storage capacity and are capable of up to 160 Gigabytes per second of parallel access performance. According Aeon, this next generation system pushes the limits of Lustre storage performance.

Petascale Comet Supercomputer Enters Early Operations

“Comet is really all about providing high-performance computing to a much larger research community – what we call ‘HPC for the 99 percent’ – and serving as a gateway to discovery,” said SDSC Director Michael Norman, the project’s principal investigator. “Comet has been specifically configured to meet the needs of researchers in domains that have not traditionally relied on supercomputers to solve their problems.”

Video: SDSC’s Data Oasis Gen II: ZFS, 40GbE, and Replication

“The second generation of SDSC’s Data Oasis Lustre storage is coming online to support Comet, a new XSEDE cluster targeted at the long tail of science. The servers have been designed with Lustre on ZFS in mind, and also update the network to use bonded 40GbE interfaces. The raw storage totals 7.7 PB and are again based on commodity hardware provided by Aeon Computing, maintaining our focus on cost.”