Sandia National Laboratories’ Vanguard program has selected SoftIron, Ltd., to provide supplemental file and object storage for Sandia’s ARM-based Stria high performance computing cluster.
Stria supports the petascale Astra supercomputer – which Sandia said is the fastest ARM-based system on the TOP500 listing of the world’s most powerful computers – as a development system for preparing software releases and codes to be used on Astra. SoftIron said its petabyte-scale HyperDrive Storage appliances, which support the tier two storage needs of Stria, are “purpose-built to maximize the performance of open-source Ceph storage software, enabling simple and efficient deployment at scale.”
The Vanguard program evaluates the feasibility of emerging HPC technologies for use in platforms supporting the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration’s management of the U.S. nuclear stockpile. The deployment includes SoftIron’s HyperDrive Storage Manager, which provides an interface for system administrators to remotely manage HyperDrive storage clusters as an integrated software and hardware system, eliminating the need for “command line warriors,” SoftIron said.
“Sandia continually endeavors to push the envelope of HPC system technologies and SoftIron’s approach to software-defined storage aligns well with that vision,” Matthew Curry, Ph.D., senior member of technical staff at Sandia. “Their task-specific hardware demonstrates the purposeful design and use of ARM-based processors for lean but responsive storage services. SoftIron is able to deliver a fully supported Ceph solution with an ARM technology base, supporting the needs for the advanced application exploration activities on the Stria system.”
The deployment includes SoftIron’s HyperDrive Storage Manager, which provides an interface for system administrators to remotely manage HyperDrive storage clusters as an integrated software and hardware system, eliminating the need for “command line warriors,” SoftIron said.
Phil Straw, SoftIron CEO, said Sandia Vanguard’s selection of his company “gives further validation to SoftIron’s position that hardware really does matter in the software-defined data center. We have uniquely taken a task-specific approach that builds around open source, software-defined packages to create powerful and elegant data center solutions that maximize capabilities and minimize complexity.”
Source: SoftIron
