HPCwire: IU Data Capacitor Reaches 977 MB/Second Across TeraGrid

The Leading Source for Global News and Information Covering the Ecosystem of High Productivity Computing

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

June 08, 2007

IU Data Capacitor Reaches 977 MB/Second Across TeraGrid

BLOOMINGTON, Ind., June 7 --Indiana University's Data Capacitor, a 535 TB Lustre filesystem designed to store and manipulate large data sets, has demonstrated in its opening weeks of production a single client transfer rate of 977 MB per second across the TeraGrid network. Data was copied from a single computer equipped with a 10 Gigabit Ethernet card from Oak Ridge National Laboratory to the Data Capacitor at IU's Bloomington Campus. The outstanding transfer rate, which represents nearly 80 percent of the 10 Gigabit network's theoretical capacity, was reported by Data Capacitor project lead, Stephen Simms during a talk entitled, "Wide Area Filesystem Performance Using Lustre on the TeraGrid." The talk was given by Simms and collaborators from Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center at the TeraGrid '07 conference being held this week in Madison, Wis.

"These numbers illustrate how the Data Capacitor and the high-speed TeraGrid network could help distributed resources feel less distributed to the user," said Simms. "Imagine being able to move 12 DVDs worth of data from your desktop machine onto a filesystem two states away in a single minute. This technology has the potential to significantly change how scientists collaborate across distance."

Since entering production in April, the Data Capacitor has supported several high-profile projects including the Linked Environment for Atmospheric Discovery (LEAD) Science Gateway, which provides meteorological data, forecast models and analysis tools for the interactive exploration, simulation and prediction of weather, and the WxChallenge, a collegiate weather forecasting competition. The Data Capacitor is also a key cyberinfrastructure component in an international federation of crystallography labs under the Common Instrument Middleware Project (CIMA).

"The Data Capacitor has been exceptionally valuable to the CIMA project," said principal investigator Donald F. McMullen, of the Pervasive Technology Labs at IU. "Its capacity and throughput allowed us to design and implement a system that supports data sharing and maintains workflows involving massive amounts of instrument data for about a dozen labs in the U.S. and around the world."

Data Capacitor principal investigator Craig Stewart, associate dean of Research Technologies and chief operating officer of the Pervasive Technology Labs at IU, stated "The wide-area capabilities we have demonstrated for the Data Capacitor and the TeraGrid will enable IU to better support scientific workflows -- the end to end transformation of data into knowledge through use of advanced cyberinfrastructure."

The Data Capacitor was developed by a team from University Information Technology Services, the IU School of Informatics and Pervasive Technology Labs at Indiana University, with financial support from the National Science Foundation. Project Co-PI's include Randall Bramley, Catherine Pilachowski and Beth Plale. Its architecture uses components manufactured by Data Direct Networks, Myricom and Dell. The Data Capacitor's Lustre filesystem is supported by Cluster File Systems.

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award Numbers CNS0521433, ACI-0338618l, OCI-0451237, OCI-0535258, and OCI-0504075. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

About UITS

University Information Technology Services (UITS) at Indiana University, with offices on the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, develops and maintains a university-wide information technology environment to support excellence in research, teaching, outreach, and lifelong learning. Through providing high performance computing, visualization technologies, and network management, UITS contributes toward the advancement of multi-disciplinary research. It also supports research among hundreds of research and education institutions by providing network operations for several advanced networks such as Internet2.

About Pervasive Technology Labs

Pervasive Technology Labs at IU (http://pervasive.iu.edu), established in 1999 by a grant from Lilly Endowment, Inc., performs leading-edge research based on the ubiquity of information technology in today's world, creating new inventions, devices and software that extend the capabilities of information technology in advanced research and everyday life. Fundamental to its mission are efforts to attract, encourage, educate and retain Indiana 's workforce of tomorrow, and to accelerate economic growth in the state through the commercialization of new inventions and by forming and supporting new startup companies. In carrying out its mission, Pervasive Technology Labs is helping IU maintain its position of international leadership in information technology research and, as a result, is helping to enhance the prosperity of the entire state of Indiana.

About TeraGrid

The TeraGrid, sponsored by the National Science Foundation Office of Cyberinfrastructure, is a partnership of people, resources and services that enables discovery in U.S. science and engineering. Through coordinated policy, grid software, and high-performance network connections, the TeraGrid integrates a distributed set of high-capability computational, data-management and visualization resources to make research more productive. With Science Gateway collaborations and education programs, the TeraGrid also connects and broadens scientific communities.

-----

Source: Indiana University

Article Tools

Share & Save Options

Discussion

There are 0 discussion items posted.

Join the Discussion

You must be a registered user in order to comment on HPCwire stories.

Members enjoy:

	Access to Special Content, including Podcasts, Webcasts, and Whitepapers and more!
	Ability to take an active role in the discussions that are shaping the HPC technology discipline!
	Special offers available only to HPCwire members!

Become a Registered User Today!

Registered Users Log in Here to Comment

Email Address:	Password (case sensitive)

Remember me	Forgot Password?

RSS Feeds

Feeds by Topic

Feeds by Industry

Feeds by Content Type

Feature Articles

The Week in Review

UPenn adds third state to nanowire storage; and UIUC is named the first CUDA Center of Excellence. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

IBM Looks to Tap Massive Data Streams

Modern civilization is positively drenched in data, some of which needs to be dealt with in real time to be of any value. Businesses, especially in the financial industry, have long recognized this, and have been building custom systems to collect, analyze, and react to information as it is captured. IBM thinks the time is right to generalize these approaches into a new field of computing -- and a new business -- it calls stream computing.
Read More...

Gravity Attracts a GigE HPC Cluster

Not all supercomputing rides on InfiniBand or proprietary interconnects. For technical applications that decompose neatly into loosely-coupled threads, a big cluster with vanilla Gigabit Ethernet does just fine. The top Ethernet system on the TOP500 list -- at number 58 -- is the new ATLAS cluster at the Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics in Germany.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

San Diego Gets Set for Storage Explosion

Jul 03 | Byte and Switch | The San Diego Supercomputer Center, which provides much of the core storage for the TeraGrid, is overhauling its 28 petabyte storage system to support tremendous data growth. Read more...

Intel's Gelsinger Predicts Intel Inside Everything

Jul 03 | ExtremeTech | Intel exec Pat Gelsinger said he sees the Intel Architecture permeating virtually every segment of computing, as the company's microprocessors expand into more and more cores. Read more...

A Massively Parallel Future

Jul 03 | Bangkok Post | The latest programmable GPUs are starting to steal application cycles from CPUs. Read more...

UCSD Researchers Identify Potential Bird Flu Drugs

Jul 02 | UC San Diego News Center | With the help of resources at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, UCSD scientists have isolated more than two dozen promising compounds from which new “designer drugs” might be developed to combat the avian flu virus. Read more...

Implementing Multi-Core: The Devil Is in the Detail

Jul 02 | Chip Design Magazine | Dual- and quad-core processors barely scratch the surface of the potential of multi-core systems. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

New HPC White Paper: Star-P® Performance on IBM Linux Clusters

Jul 03 | | The paper explores some of the performance benefits of Star-P on commodity scalable systems such as IBM's Linux clusters based on multi-core Intel Xeon processors. The results demonstrate substantial performance gains with almost no programmer effort-roughly a 24-fold speed improvement for solving linear matrix equations. An overview of parallel computing with Star-P, a description of the performance test cases and description of IBM cluster configurations used for testing are also addressed.

Fast N-Body Simulation with CUDA C Compiler

Apr 17 | | An N-body simulation numerically approximates the evolution of a system of bodies in which each body continuously interacts with every other body, and it arises in many other computational science problems as well.

Improving Performance and Manageability for Seismic Processing and Imaging Applications with Parallel Storage

Jun 05 | | As pressure increases on the upstream seismic processing community to deliver ever-higher levels of productivity and efficiency, a new generation of storage solutions will be required that allow the maximum utilisation of high-performance computing (HPC) Linux cluster resources, together with the minimum of management overhead.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Podcast: Interview with Ben Bennett of ClearSpeed Technology

Today, HPC organizations are requiring substantially more floating point performance to solve real-world problems. In this podcast, Ben Bennett, ClearSpeed General Manager, discusses how acceleration technology can improve the overall performance of standard x86-based systems...