The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing
April 20, 2007
SAN Solutions for HPC Storage
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »
The rise of multi-server clusters has changed the landscape of computing dramatically and permanently. Not only are clusters surpassing yesterday's behemoth supercomputers, they are also triggering a concurrent revolution in storage architecture. Today's high-performance computing (HPC) environment not only breaks the boundaries that stymied Teraflop progress for decades, but does so at far lower cost than supercomputers.
Storage needs are skyrocketing as content and applications grow more complex and sophisticated. Nowadays, an organization needn't be working at supercomputer levels to have massive storage requirements -- which explains in part the growing exodus from direct attached storage to the "shared" storage area network (SAN) approach. Until recently, the innovative SAN infrastructure was almost entirely overlooked by administrators who specialized in optimizing transaction performance. But increasingly, these same administrators are recognizing the ability of SANs to centrally manage and scale their ever increasing storage needs.
The SAN Is Rising
As most administrators know, using multiple file servers to support a giant cluster increases the cost, complexity and management of the environment. Simply adding more storage is difficult and disruptive when dealing with data-intensive applications. As new volumes and mount points are added, capacity and bandwidth must be balanced and re-balanced across multiple servers. While clusters can generate trillions of calculations per second, managing that huge data volume is an issue. These and other challenges are why, until recently, advances in processing performance easily outpaced scalable storage. And why the unique abilities of SANs are making inroads into supercomputing.
For over a decade, SANs have gone through the typical product life cycle. It has gone from early adopter Fortune 100 companies making the first purchases in an effort to find a way to consolidate storage and save datacenter costs up to today, where now small- to medium-sized businesses can afford to own and operate a SAN. Along the way, cost and complexity was removed from the implementation and management in order to accelerate adoption.
A similar effect has happened to HPC with the use of general-purpose CPUs and open systems software (Linux, clustering and file systems), both of which have provided for the removal of cost, complexity and size of the compute engine. Both technologies are at the crest of a new wave of adoption in each other's markets.
The right SAN in an HPC environment can support the huge capacity and aggregate throughput of the cluster or grid, plus perform dynamic load balancing and data redistribution, spreading data across the storage architecture and providing a single point of management and namespace for a file system. A relatively low-cost SAN investment can easily surpass attached storage in terms of utilization, flexibility, scalability and performance.
Nevertheless, to fulfill its promise, networked storage must be simple, transparent and inexpensive to implement, so that its costs/benefits prevail in the real world. Finding the optimal storage strategy is a challenge that administrators must first recognize, then move forward to develop the architecture, find the right vendor, implement the solution economically -- and manage it all. In the past, this transition may have seemed risky and daunting to administrators, who elected to stay with their old solutions. By now, however, SANs have the momentum from the commercial marketplace to leverage its adoption into the scientific marketplace.
Early Adoption of SANs in HPC
For studios producing animated films or special effects, success in terms of deadlines, cost, audience appeal, revenue and future viability now depends heavily on SANs. Achieving smooth transitions, fine detail of motion, texturing, shadowing and tonal qualities requires compute power and unprecedented amounts of data, which must travel among workstations at lightning speed throughout post-production, editing and other processes. CGI (computer-generated imagery) data transfer and editing needs a high-bandwidth, low-latency system -- and that's where the SAN shines.
Page: 1 of 41 | 2 | 3 | 4 All »
Article Tools
Share Options
(Digg, Technorati, more)
Subscribe
Sponsored Links
New Paper: Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Learn how domain experts can run VHLL programs like MATLAB® on a variety of high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming and how to work with the largest datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
RSS Feeds
Feeds by Topic
- Applications
- Developer Tools
- Interconnects
- Middleware
- Networks
- Processors
- Storage
- Systems
- Visualization
Feeds by Industry
Feeds by Content Type
Top Headlines
3D Seismic Data: Taking a Smarter Approach to Interpretation
Jul 09 | Engineer Live | The demand for computational tools to underpin the 3D seismic interpretation process has never been more apparent. Read more...
Engineering Unemployment Soared in 2Q to 8.6%
Jul 08 | EE Times | Unemployment for U.S. engineers has reached record levels, according to government figures. Read more...
Gartner Adjusts 2009 IT Spend Downward Again
Jul 08 | Network World | Global spending for 2009 projected to drop 6 percent, for a total of $3.2 trillion. Read more...
Concurrent and Parallel Are Not The Same
Jul 08 | Linux Magazine | Portability or efficiency? Neither is guaranteed when writing explicit parallel code. Read more...
800 TFLOP Real-Time Ray Tracing GPU Unveiled, Not for Gamers
Jul 07 | Ars Technica | Japanese company builds custom ASIC to accelerate real-time ray traced rendering for the auto industry. Read more...
Featured Whitepapers
Parallel Computing Without Parallel Programming
Jul 10 | | Engineers, scientists, and other domain experts depend on the productivity enabled by very high-level language (VHLL) tools like MATLAB® and Python. However, as datasets grow larger and programs get more sophisticated, ordinary desktop computers can no longer keep up. The paper explores how to run VHLL programs on high-performance platforms without low-level reprogramming. Work with large datasets and complex algorithms without sacrificing ease of use or reducing productivity.
Building High Performance Computing in a Green and Modular Solution Building Block
Apr 14 | | Many HPC IT departments are feeling the rising pressure to deliver more capacity computing and performance while trying to reduce the total cost of ownership. This white paper discusses how an environmentally-friendly and open-standards HPC building block based computing system using flexible interconnect options helps address capacity computing needs.
Multimedia
Webcast: Dell Expands HPC Access and Adoption with Intel Cluster Ready Program
Source: Addison Snell, GM/VP, Tabor Research; sponsored by Dell
Many organizations that could benefit from the use of HPC clusters find that it is complicated to get the systems up and running because of limited IT resources or the complexities of the clusters themselves. Learn how the Intel Cluster Ready program, for which Dell was an original partner, seeks to address this challenge for entry level and mid-range HPC users.
Video White Paper: Architecting a Better Network Storage Solution
BlueArc's Titan architecture represents an evolutionary step in file servers by creating a hardware-based file system that can scale bandwidth, IOPS, and overall data capacity well beyond conventional software-based devices. With its ability to virtualize a massive storage pool of up to four usable petabytes of tiered storage, Titan can scale with growing data requirements, offering a competitive advantage for businesses, researchers, or other enterprises seeking to better manage data growth while still ensuring optimal performance.
Webcast: HPC Development Solutions: Sun Studio & Sun HPC ClusterTools
Sun Studio Compilers and Tools and Sun HPC ClusterTools allow you to create high performance parallel applications for OpenSolaris, Solaris and Linux. Sun Studio Express 11/08 includes MPI performance analysis capabilities and full OpenMP 3.0 compiler support. Learn about all this and the latest in Sun HPC ClusterTools 8.1.
Newsletters
Stay informed! Subscribe to HPCwire email Newsletters.
HPC Job Bank
-
HPC Systems Administrator
McGill University -
High Performance Computing Systems Administrator
Idaho National Laboratory -
Solution Engineer- HPC
Dell Inc -
Parallel Programmer
Cardiff University -
Principal Software Research Engineer
Indiana University -
Post Doctoral Researcher - Exascale Stream Computing
IBM - Visit the HPCwire Job Bank
Featured Events
-
July 13-16, 2009
WORLDCOMP'09
Las Vegas , NV
USA
-
August 24-28, 2009
Data Mining: Levels I, II, & III
Denver , CO
USA