Sun HPC consortium: SDSC and SAM-QFS

SC07: John Simons is blogging from Sun’s HPC Consortium out in Reno. He mentions a talk by Bryan Banister, Manager, Storage Systems and Production Servers, at the San Diego Supercomputing Center (SDSC).

As an example, Bryan described a recent computation done by the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) which generated 47 TBytes of output data and took five days to run on 240 processors. In the near future, the center would like to do a 1 PByte run that will require transferring that data and then processing for 20 days on 1000 processors. To do this, they will require 10 GByte/sec parallel file system transfer rates, with higher rates needed in the near future.

…The talk closed with a brief description of what SDSC sees as emergent storage technologies that they consider important. These included solid state disk (ssd/flash) for high performance, 8 Gb fiberchannel technology, SATA drives, RAID6, expansion/adoption of 10 GbE, MAID for transient data, and as QDR (quad data rate) becomes available, InfiniBand as a combined storage and cluster interconnect technology.