Cray
HPCwire

Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers
in the World and the People Who Run Them

Language Flags

Visit additional Tabor Communication Publications

Datanami
Digital Manufacturing Report
HPC in the Cloud
Green Computing Report
HPCwire Japan

Tabor Communications
Corporate Video

Panasas CTO Predicts 2018 SSD Success


Panasas made news in 2008 when it was selected as the storage system to power the world’s first petascale system and they are looking ahead to 2018—the projected year that exascale computing will arrive.

This week the company’s co-founder and CTO, Garth Gibson, hit on some of the specific challenges on the storage front that will need to be addressed for the era of 70 TB/s bandwidth required for exascale computing.

Gibson said that most estimates contend that the storage system for checkpointing will need to deliver 60-70 TB/s of storage, which means his company is facing a lofty target. Panasas and other storage vendors with their eye on the 2018 prize will be looking at approximately 20% per year disk improvement to get to that level—and that is, as Gibson simply put it, “a lot of disks.”

He claims that the most cost effective way to reach these goals is to stage through SSD, not so much because of the non-volatility issue, but because it provides cheap memory capability and “decent megabytes per second per dollar.”



Gibson detailed the SSD slant to Panasas’ exascale strategy:

"I think there’s a good likelihood that we’ll see a checkpoint restart package evolve that will take data from the main memories of the nodes, drop it into SSD then go back to the compute and dribble to the storage—that will probably give us a factor of ten as the ratio of the amount of time we spend in capturing checkpoints versus the amount of time before the next checkpoint, so we’ll probably get to storage in the neighborhood of six terabytes per second.

Now that’s a much more achievable number in terms of the cost of the storage system but the disks aren’t going away because they’re three to thirty times the capacity of main memory and you don’t want to try to provision all of that in any other solid state technology because of cost."

In such conversations the issue of high-density capabilities always tends to arise. Gibson addressed this by pointing to new movements in the drive industry, which he says is finally realizing that even though it’s been possible for some time, there is value in creating read heads that are thinner than write heads, which creates an opportunity to build higher density drives by taking the write head and shifting it half a track over, thus half overwriting the last track since the read track can still see the half of the track that wasn’t overwritten.

While he notes that this isn’t “perfect” he does say that it mirrors current technologies already. In his words, “The big problem is that when you go to do a rewrite of a sector, you would trash the downstream sectors along the way, which is going to force a change in behavior—but that’s what we do with SSDs anyway."


Full story at Panasas

June 19, 2013

June 18, 2013

June 17, 2013

June 14, 2013

June 13, 2013

June 12, 2013

June 11, 2013

June 10, 2013

June 07, 2013


Most Read Features

Most Read Around the Web

Most Read This Just In


Feature Articles

My Supercomputer is Bigger Than Yours!

Contributing commentator, Andrew Jones, offers a break in the news cycle with an assessment of what the national "size matters" contest means for the U.S. and other nations...
Read more...

Alternatives Emerge as Linpack Loses Ground

Today at the International Supercomputing Conference in Leipzing, Germany, Jack Dongarra presented on a proposed benchmark that could carry a bit more weight than its older Linpack companion. The high performance conjugate gradient (HPCG) concept takes into account new architectures for new applications, while shedding the floating point....
Read more...

Intel Snaps New Grips to HPC Hook

Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
Read more...

Sponsored Whitepapers

Best Practices in Big Data Storage

05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.

Progress in Parallel: the Bull Parallel Programming Center

04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.

Sponsored Multimedia

HPCwire Live! Atlanta's Big Data Kick Off Week Meets HPC

Join HPCwire Editor Nicole Hemsoth and Dr. David Bader from Georgia Tech as they take center stage on opening night at Atlanta's first Big Data Kick Off Week, filmed in front of a live audience. Nicole and David look at the evolution of HPC, today's big data challenges, discuss real world solutions, and reveal their predictions. Exactly what does the future holds for HPC?

Webinar: Mellanox Virtual Modular Switch, the Most Efficient 40GbE Aggregation Switch Solution

Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.

Atlanta's Big Data Kick Off Week Meets HPC Cray Exxact

HPC Job Bank


Featured Events






  • November 17, 2013 - November 22, 2013
    SC'13
    Denver, CO
    United States


HPCwire Events