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Entries filed under “Storage”

Panasas Showcases Hybrid ActiveStor 14 at SC12

By Rich | Published December 7, 2012

In this video from SC12, Geoffrey Noer from Panasas describes the hybrid storage capabilities of the new ActiveStor 14 system.

The world’s fastest parallel storage system just got faster with Panasas ActiveStor 14. By accelerating small file and metadata performance with Solid State Drive (SSD) technology, ActiveStor 14 delivers extreme performance, for the technical computing and big data workloads commonly found in HPC environments. Based on a fifth-generation storage blade architecture and the Panasas PanFS storage operating system, ActiveStor 14 delivers unmatched scale-out NAS performance in addition to the manageability, reliability, and value required by demanding computing organizations in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, media, and other sectors.”

Read the Full Story.


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Xyratex Announces OEM Deals with Dell and HP for Lustre Powered Storage

By Rich | Published December 3, 2012

In this video SC12, Mike Stoltz from Xyratex describes the company’s ClusterStor products for HPC. Xyratex recently announced that HP and Dell will resell ClusterStor to power their advanced HPC clusters.


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Aeon Computing Showcases Award-Winning Data Oasis at SC12

By Rich | Published December 2, 2012

In this video from SC12, Doug Johnson from Aeon Computing describes the company’s innovative Data Oasis technology powered by the Lustre file system.

What advantages does Lustre offer as a foundation for a storage system? Bandwidth. Its performance scales out linearly as the file system scales in build out. The more object servers you have, the more network paths you have, the faster your potential. It is the opposite of a large scale monolithic NFS appliance with one spigot.”

For more information, check out our exclusive interview with Aeon’s co-founder, Jeff Johnson.


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DDN Announces $100K WARP Prize for Big Data Innovation

By Rich | Published December 1, 2012

DDN has launched a $100,000 prize to recognize scientific breakthroughs enabled by high performance computing with major research institutions pledging their support. The global program focuses on scientific advancement and insight through the exploration of novel approaches to Big Data analysis, Exascale processing, cloud computing, memory-class storage and other emerging developments in HPC.

For more than 12 years, DDN’s leading-edge storage solutions for content-intensive computing have helped universities around the world redefine the boundaries of science and research,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DDN. “With WARP, we will accelerate the incredible changes of the Big Data era by bringing together the best minds in our industry, and also by providing needed support to the next generation of groundbreaking researchers.”

In conjunction with the WARP program, the company also announced $100,000 in annual prizes to recognize emerging scientific breakthroughs enabled by technology, including a $75,000 first prize and a $25,000 second prize each year. A WARP board of advisors will be established to influence the direction of the WARP program and to select the annual WARP Prize winners. Read the Full Story.

A Tip of the Hat goes out to Suhaib Khan for this photo of DDN’s WARP slide from the Saudi Arabian HPC Conference at KAUST. The event is going on all weekend, and you can follow his Twitter Event Coverage with hastag #SAHPC.


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Scalable Informatics Keeps Keen Eye on Real-World Storage Performance at SC12

By Rich | Published November 30, 2012

In this video from SC12, Joe Landman from Scalable Informatics describes the company’s latest storage technologies for HPC.

JackRabbit is a tightly coupled high performance computing and storage platform that integrates processing and network connectivity at prices starting at less than $1 per GB. siFlash is intended as a metadata server for parallel file systems, fast NFS and CIFS data storage, and similar high performance use cases. Featuring PCIe-flash cards, SSD-flash devices, or RAID-attached flash, siFlash units have achieved random reads and writes exceeding 950k IOPs to and from storage using 8k block sizes and a 30% write mixture in manufacturer benchmarks.”

Read the Full Story.


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Slidecast: NetApp – Big Data and HPC

By Rich | Published November 27, 2012

In this slidecast, Richard Treadway and Rich Seger from NetApp discuss the company’s storage solutions for Big Data and HPC. The company’s HPC solutions for Lustre support massive performance and storage density without sacrificing efficiency.

Download the MP3 * Download the slides (PDF) * Subscribe on iTunes * If Dropbox is blocked, download audio from Google Drive.


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Steve Simms on the Data Capacitor II at Indiana University

By Rich | Published November 25, 2012

In this video from SC12, Steve Simms from Indiana University describes a recent upgrade to the Data Capacitor project, a high-speed, high-capacity storage facility for very large data sets. With 5 PB of storage, Data Capacitor II will support big data applications used in computational research. IU partnered with DataDirect Networks to develop Data Capacitor II, which is scheduled to be installed in the IU Data Center in spring 2013.


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Panasas Chief Scientist on Where HPC Meets Big Data and Hadoop

By Rich | Published November 19, 2012

In this video, Panasas Chief Scientist Garth Gibson describes how the company brings Hadoop support to bear in the world of Big Data and HPC.

Hadoop is a great platform for taking a gigantic amount of information and reducing it down to the central core that you then want to do the second level of analysis on. And that’s what’s happening across the enterprise, data warehousing, and HPC. So the fundamental issue is that after you’re done crunching with that commodity Hadoop cluster, you now have valuable assets. You want those valuable assets on a system you trust. You want it on a good, high-quality NAS. But it has to keep up. You need the high speed of a direct-flow environment. And then, it turns out, that once you can process from off-board quickly, you can optimize Hadoop and go faster in many cases because you’re using your off-board NAS.”

Recorded at SC12 in Salt Lake City. Read the Full Story.


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Interview: Aeon’s Data Oasis Storage Platform Powered by Lustre

By Rich | Published November 19, 2012

We are big fans of Lustre here at insideHPC. And when I learned that Aeon Computing was building their Data Oasis storage platform on the open source file system, I sought out the company’s co-founder Jeff Johnson to learn more

insideHPC: Why build a Lustre appliance? What was the customer problem you set out to solve?

Jeff Johnson: This is all about performance. We originally set out to plan a Lustre deployment and brought in storage solutions from various well known manufacturers for Lustre benchmarking. We were surprised to discover that many storage devices that looked to be high performance on paper performed quite poorly in a Lustre environment. As a result we decided to develop one ourselves. In this particular case the customer needed Lustre performance without all of the extra, and costly, active failover high-availability features found in the very high end Lustre solutions available. That is what we built.

insideHPC: What sets the Oasis Appliance from other available storage solutions available out there?

Jeff Johnson: There are many storage solutions available in the market but not all of them do Lustre well. We set out to design a Lustre platform that was good at Lustre data and I/O profiles. Part of that design, in addition to performance, is that it follows Aeon Computing’s business philosophy in that there is no unnecessary, extraneous bull___t that gets in the way.

insideHPC: Is Oasis just for the HPC market, or does it have appeal to the Big Data and Cloud-based applications?

Jeff Johnson: The Data Oasis filesystem is specifically an HPC application. The EclipseSL appliance is well suited for any application where reliable, dense high-performance storage is needed. We have mainly focused on Lustre, the EclipseSL would perform well in Gluster and other distributed filesystem applications.

insideHPC: How does the Aeon design change the way you architect a Lustre system?

Jeff Johnson: We designed the EclipseSL with no bottlenecks. The data flow from the network interfaces through bus infrastructures and memory to block storage and back out encounter no bottlenecks or oversubscription. I don’t know that what we did necessarily changes the industry in any way. We simply started with a blank sheet of paper.

insideHPC: What advantages does Lustre offer as a foundation for a storage system?

Jeff Johnson: Bandwidth. Its performance scales out linearly as the file system scales in build out. The more object servers you have, the more network paths you have, the faster your potential. It is the opposite of a large scale monolithic NFS appliance with one spigot.

insideHPC: What was your first reaction when you learned you won the Best of Show Award?

Jeff Johnson: We checked the calendar to make sure it wasn’t April Fools Day. There may have been some expletives of disbelief uttered in the office. Once it sunk in, humbled, flattered and still a bit surprised.

Check out Aeon this week at SC12 booth #2119.


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DDN Announces $100 Million Investment In Exascale Computing

By Rich | Published November 17, 2012

This week at SC12, DDN announced a $100 million investment in its research and development efforts, specifically directed at resolving key challenges to achieving Exascale levels of performance in scientific computing. The new investments by DDN represent a substantial percentage of DDN’s engineering resources and will be directed toward technology challenges, which become critical at Exascale proportions, including: I/O Acceleration; Converged Infrastructure; Information Value Extraction; and Energy and Data Center Efficiency.

Data-intensive computing impacts individuals, organizations, industries and governments by enabling the creation of valuable information based on massive volumes of highly complex data,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DDN. “Significant investment is required to allow researchers to address challenges such as the design of new materials needed for better electric car batteries, the improvement of multi-physics models for more accurate severe weather modeling, and the development of high-resolution cosmological simulations to help understand dark matter and the universe around us. With today’s announcement, DDN is establishing a clear direction for our Exascale computing agenda and reaffirms DDN’s continued central role in the future of supercomputing.”

DDN disclosed that the investments will center around the following critical technologies for Exascale computing:

  • I/O Acceleration: New file system, middleware and storage tiering methods will be required to eliminate scalability barriers associated with conventional methods of file, object and database access in order to achieve 1,000x scalability, TB/s performance and million-way application CPU parallelism.
  • Converged Infrastructure: The convergence of computing, storage and networking technologies will give rise to intelligent and accelerated data storage infrastructures which can co-locate pre-processing and post-processing routines natively within the storage infrastructure to enable applications to access data with increased acuity.
  • Information Value Extraction: Leveraging converged infrastructures, DDN R&D efforts will support the development of scalable data analytics environments to extract actionable insights from vast volumes of unstructured data.
  • Energy and Data Center Efficiency: With the emergence of storage-class memory and software tools, infrastructures can be built with fewer components compared to today’s disk-based technologies. These initiatives will serve to significantly reduce hardware acquisition costs but will also make data centers much more space and power efficient by reducing storage footprint by more than 75%.

This is exciting news for the HPC community looking to see more vendors step up to the plate for the incredibly daunting goal of Exascale computing within this decade. I can tell you that the DDN booth was packed with people all week at SC12. Read the Full Story.


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