Tackling HPC Storage Bottlenecks with Bull Director for HPSS

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bullToday Atos announced Bull Director for HPSS, Data Management software dedicated to High Performance Computing. Bull Director for HPSS optimizes current large scale storage solutions and frees up compute time for users.

“In a context of data explosion, storage is often a bottleneck and has a negative impact on application performance. Atos has a long experience of implementing HPSS in challenging environments where long-term data preservation and re-use of massive data sets are key. Our ultimate objective with Bull Director for HPSS and the other future components is to get rid of these bottlenecks and free up compute time for users.” explains Eric Eppe, Head of Products and Solutions for extreme computing at Atos.

Bull Director for HPSS includes the following features:

  • It is an ad-on to HPSS that brings performance and ease of management to the next level.
  • It improves the global performance of HPSS for tape libraries, in an environment with many concurrent access requests, by grouping simultaneous requests from different users in real time.
  • It sorts all file recalls dynamically and transparently, and queues them according to their position on tapes, thus massively decreasing tape mounts and tape movements. This improves drastically HPSS performance when massive file recalls are the norm.

As data sets with hundreds of terabytes or many petabytes of data become increasingly common-place, Hierarchical Storage Management (HSM) becomes a cornerstone of successful intensive data management systems. HSM is a data storage technique that automatically moves data between high-performance / high-cost storage devices and low-end / low-cost storage devices. To optimize costs, HSM systems store the bulk of data on slow, economical devices such as robotic tape libraries, and copy data to faster disk drives whenever they are needed for processing.

HPSS (High Performance Storage System) is an HSM system born from a Collaboration between IBM Global Business Services and 5 American DOE laboratories, augmented lately by the French CEA/DAM.

Bull Director for HPSS V1.0 will be available in December 2016.

SC16Atos will exhibit the full breadth of its HPC offer at SC16 booth #721 to discover the latest Bull sequana blades, the BXI high performance interconnect, and extreme factory, the HPC-as-a-service solution from Bull.

See our complete coverage of SC16

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