NERSC Realigns for Enhanced Data Focus

By Tiffany Trader

February 26, 2015

The National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC), one of the nation’s primary HPC facilities for scientific research, has implemented several organizational changes, which it says will help its 6,000 users “more productively manage their data-intensive research.”

NERSC’s Storage Systems Group will move under the Services Department, in order to foster greater synergy with the Data & Analytics Services Group. As part of this restructuring, Katie Antypas, who heads the Services Department, is now the NERSC Deputy for Data Science.

“Data science is a cross-cutting thrust for NERSC and Katie will be responsible for organizing our work in this area and furthering our data strategy,” explains NERSC Director Sudip Dosanjh. “This effort will require close collaboration between the Storage Systems and Data & Analytics Services groups at NERSC, in addition to other groups in NERSC, Computational Research Division and ESnet.”

Data is not just a buzzword, it’s the emerging fourth-paradigm of scientific discovery, and the org shakeup positions NERSC to focus more resources on data, how it’s moved, managed, and analyzed.

“From our users’ perspective, this approach will provide a more coherent structure and result in improved tools and capabilities to help them manage, and move data between the different layers of memory and storage,” says Antypas, who is also leading the Cori supercomputer initiative. “When you look at the architectures coming down the road, it’s evident that the lines between memory and storage are blurring. For example, in our newest system, Cori, there will be a Burst Buffer, a layer of flash storage between the system’s memory and file system, so it just makes sense that our Storage group and our Data and Analytics group will need to work together to make it and future services a success.”

NERSC is meeting data challenges in other ways too by joining forces with other national labs to keep pace with rapidly expanding data flows. Prabhat, head of NERSC’s Data & Analytics Services Group, references a new class of data challenges involving simulation, experimental, and observational data. “Our goal is to better utilize our existing infrastructure so we can plan and prioritize for handling these new modalities of data,” he says.

The Storage Systems Group, led by Jason Hick, will also have an expanded role in response to an increased demand for data services. The group supports NERSC’s science data portals. Also known as science gateways, the portals provide a mechanism for the dissemination of large datasets, such as observational data from telescopes and neutrino observatories.

The org changes reflect the evolving science landscape, says Antypas, marked by ever-larger datasets and the merging of experimental and simulation-based discovery.

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