The conference will focus on the following topics: Progress of Exascale in the European Union, high-performance interconnects, Accelerators and Parallel I/O, communication libraries (MPI, SHMEM, PGAS), GPU computing (CUDA, OpenCL) Big Data, advanced topics / technologies / development including server and storage systems, and hands-on clustering, network, troubleshooting, tuning, optimizations. The conference is open to the public and will bring together system managers, researchers, developers, computational scientists and industry affiliates.
Having been to this event several times, I can tell you that Lugano is one of the most beautiful towns in the world. It’s a solid three-day workshop, and this year they’ll be treating attendees to a boat trip on lake Lugano with an on-board apero and dinner.
Today Data Direct Networks announced that the company is offering Whamcloud’s Chroma Enterprise central management system with its ExaScaler parallel file storage product. Chroma is a central management system that is deeply integrated with Lustre. It brings together information from multiple sources to provide a unified view of what is going on in a storage system ― while vastly simplifying installation, configuration, maintenance, monitoring, and fault diagnosis. This enables enterprises with storage intensive applications to get much more out of their storage environment.
Our testing already shows great potential for extending Lustre adoption. Chroma Enterprise quickly provides a deep understanding of the relationship between workload and storage performance, something only available to serious Lustre veterans until now,” said Stephen Simms, manager of the High Performance File Systems group at Indiana University. “Chroma Enterprise will enable organizations to use Lustre without the need for extensive training. This is a significant leap for Lustre.”
DDN disclosed that this announcement of Chroma Enterprise is the first of several developments the company will roll out this year as part of an extensive R&D effort to eliminate systems management complexity of hyperscale Big Data storage infrastructure. Read the Full Story.
In related news, DDN and Whamcloud will be joining OpenSFS and the rest of the Lustre community at the LUG 2012 meeting in Austin on April 23 – 25. Register now.
Today Red Hat announced that it has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Gluster.
The explosion of big data and the new paradigm of cloud computing are converging, forcing IT to re-think storage investments that are cost-effective, manageable and scale for the future,” said Brian Stevens, CTO and vice president, Worldwide Engineering at Red Hat. “Our customers are looking for software-based storage solutions that manage their file-based data on-premise, in the cloud and bridging between the two. With unstructured data growth (such as log files, virtual machines, email, audio, video and documents), the 90′s paradigm of forcing everything into expensive, single-system DBMS residing on an internal corporate SAN has become unwieldy and impractical.”
So what’s this really about? Sources tell me its likely a defensive acquisition by Redhat against Oracle, and that we can expect to see more of deals like this soon.
A number of hpc and big data shops are running Gluster. It’s actually more popular outside of traditional HPC than within it (the reverse of Lustre), and its growing pretty rapidly.
Want to know more about Gluster? In this video, Tom Trainer and John Kreisa talk with Rich Brueckner of insideHPC about how Gluster delivers scale-out, open source storage solutions for standardizing the management of unstructured data.
Over at Scalability.org, Joe Landman sees this move as a good thing, but notes that there are other solutions out there like Ceph that are getting traction:
I do expect that Ceph will be the main competitor to Gluster going forward (in about a year or so) … and I’d argue that they (Dreamhost) would make one helluva acquisition target (Oracle, Redhat, etc.) . I wouldn’t put Lustre in this same category … the use case and scope for that is mostly different than Gluster. There is overlap, but it works to Gluster’s advantage.
We talked to Ceph’s Chief Archtect, Sage Weil over at Dreamhost a few weeks ago, and you can check out that podcast here. At inside-BigData, we think Dreamhost is one to watch.
Our favorite storage pundit Henry Newman continues his two-part series, “The Evolution of Stupidity,” explaining how file system issues seemingly resolved more than 20 years ago are again rearing their heads.
In the mid-1980s, most of the open system file systems came as part of a standard Unix release from USL. A few vendors, such as Cray and Amdahl, wrote their own file systems. These vendors generally did so because the standard UNIX file did not meet the requirements of the day. UFS on Solaris came from another operating system, which was written in the 1960s, called Multics . That brings us to the late 1980s, and by this time, we had a number of high-performance file systems from companies such as Convex, MultiFlow and Thinking Machines. Everyone who had larger systems had their own file system, and everyone was trying to address many, if not all, of the same issues. They were in my opinion the scalability of:
The HPC Advisory Council Switzerland Conference returns to Lugano March 13-15, 2013. 
