Lab makes Linux cluster breakthrough
Lab makes Linux cluster breakthrough
Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has set a new record for Linux cluster applications, achieving more than 10 gigabytes per second of sustained data bandwidth.
The Laboratory has been recognised for its endeavours in the storage field, winning a Best Practice award for "innovation and promise" from the Storage Network Industry Association (SNIA).
The Panasas storage cluster used in the tests is being deployed by the LANL in high performance computing environments.
For about five years, Los Alamos has strongly supported the development of scalable file systems through design, funding, testing and prototyping, and has worked with Panasas and other partners to identify the best uses of the object-based storage model.
"Secure, scalable storage for commodity supercomputers will benefit Los Alamos' national security mission as well as large web-server operations and anyone who manages huge quantities of data," said Gary Grider of Los Alamos' High Performance Computing Environments Group. "Los Alamos and the National Nuclear Security Administration have been major forces in technical efforts with academia and industry partners such as Panasas to shape where scalable storage and file systems are headed."
The parallel file systems that store data from cluster computers require extremely complex software. Before the advent of object-based storage, the parallel file system had to keep track of all the blocks of data on all storage devices, increasing complexity and causing scalability problems due to accounting in parallel.
Object-based storage, developed in large part by Garth Gibson of Carnegie-Mellon University and now also with Panasas, greatly simplifies parallel storage software with a set of secure commands that tell devices to store and manage a variable quantity of data, thereby making for a simpler and more secure approach to the complexities that parallel file systems pose.
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