HPCwire: Spider Up and Spinning Connections to All Computing Platforms at ORNL

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

HPCwire >> Industry >> Academia & Research

July 09, 2009

Spider Up and Spinning Connections to All Computing Platforms at ORNL

by Agatha Bardoel, Oak Ridge National Laboratory

Spider, the world's biggest Lustre-based, centerwide file system, has been fully tested to support Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL's) new petascale Cray XT4/XT5 Jaguar supercomputer and is now offering early access to scientists.

An extremely high-performance file system, Spider has 10.7 petabytes of disk space and can move data at more than 240 gigabytes a second. "It is the largest-scale Lustre file system in existence," said Galen Shipman, Technology Integration Group leader at ORNL's National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS). "What makes Spider different [from large file systems at other centers] is that it is the only file system for all our major simulation platforms, both capable of providing peak performance and globally accessible."

Ultimately, it will connect to all of ORNL's existing and future supercomputing platforms as well as off-site platforms across the country via GridFTP (a protocol that transports large data files), making data files accessible from any site in the system.

Shipman said Spider has demonstrated stability on the XT5 and XT4 partitions of Jaguar, on Smoky (the center's development cluster), and on Lens (the center's visualization and data analysis cluster). "We've had all these systems running on the file system concurrently, with over 26,000 compute nodes (clients) mounting the file system and performing I/O [input and output]. It's the largest demonstration of Lustre scalability in terms of client count ever achieved."

Shipman said the file system is designed to support the latest incarnation of Jaguar, which is capable of 1.64 quadrillion calculations a second (1.64 petaflops). "When they told us they needed a file system to support it, we could not just pick up the phone and order one," he said. "No vendor could deliver such a system, so we essentially trail-blazed."

It was a phased approach. ORNL computer scientists and technicians (David Dillow, Jason Hill, Ross Miller, Sarp Oral, Feiyi Wang, and James Simmons) worked in close collaboration with partners Cray Inc., Data Direct Networks (DDN), Sun Microsystems, and Dell to bring Spider online. Cray provided the expertise to make the file system available on both Jaguar XT4 and Jaguar XT5. DDN provided 48 DDN 9900 storage arrays, Sun provided the Lustre parallel file system software, and Dell provided 192 I/0 servers. The vendors' collaboration has produced a system which manages 13,000 disks and provides over 240 GB/s of throughput, a file system cluster that rivals the computational capability of many high-performance compute clusters.

The Spider parallel file system is similar to the disk in a conventional laptop -- multiplied 13,000 times. A file system cluster sits in front of the storage arrays to manage the system and project a parallel file system to the computing platforms. A large-scale InfiniBand-based system area network connects Spider to each NCCS system, making data on Spider instantly available to them all.

"As new systems are deployed at the NCCS, we just plug them into our system area network; it is really about a backplane of services," Shipman said. "Once they are plugged into the backplane, they have access to Spider and to HPSS [the center's high-performance storage system] for data archival. Users can access this file system from anywhere in the center. It really decouples data access and storage from individual systems."

Before Spider each computing platform had its own file system. Once a project ran an application on Jaguar, it then had to move the data to the Lens visualization platform for analysis. Any problem encountered along the way would necessitate that the cumbersome process be repeated. With Spider connected to both Jaguar and Lens, however, this headache is avoided. "You can think of it as eliminating islands of data. Instead of having to multiply file systems all within the NCCS, one for each of our simulation platforms, we have a single file system that is available anywhere. If you are using extremely large data sets on the order of 200 terabytes, it could save you hours and hours."

"Spider is one of the most important steps the NCCS has taken toward increasing the scientific productivity of our users," said Bronson Messer, of the Scientific Computing Group and a participant in the "Three-Dimensional Model of SN1987A Frontier" early science project. "Sophisticated users have been asking for this, while new users I have spoken with immediately see the advantages and become very excited."

Spider will have both scratch space (short-term storage for files involved in simulations, data analysis, etc.) and long-term storage for each user. Shipman said the technology integration team is now working with Sun to prepare for future NCCS platforms with even more daunting requirements.

Article Tools

Share Options

(Digg, Technorati, more)

Subscribe

Subscribe to HPCwire

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

TACC's Ranger supercomputer celebrates its second year of enabling important research; Microsoft partners with NSF to bring cloud services to researchers; and NSF submits its fiscal year 2011 budget request. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

NASA Looks to Move Science Apps Into the Cloud

It seems only natural that the US space agency would be casting its eyes toward the clouds. Sure enough, NASA is now looking to cloud computing to optimize the operation of the agency's IT infrastructure for some of its science codes. Like many commercial businesses and government organizations, NASA is being asked to do more computing with fewer datacenter resources.
Read More...

Thoughts, Observations, Beliefs & Opinions About the NSF Supercomputer Centers

There is no such thing as an NSF (Supercomputer) Center and there never has been. There should be. What there are, in the words of Ed Hayes, then comptroller of NSF, are "NSF ASSISTED Supercomputer Centers." This is a double edged sword.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

IBM Releases Energy Efficient Power7 System

Feb 09 | eWeek Europe | Company says new high-end servers will deliver "intelligent performance." Read more...

Inductive Coupling Packs Flash Drive in a Chip

Feb 09 | EE Times | Wireless technology promises energy-efficient chip-to-chip communication. Read more...

IBM, Microsoft Help Create Montana Supercomputer

Feb 08 | eWeek | A new kind of Rocky Mountain high. Read more...

AMD Aims for GPUs in Mainstream Servers Starting 2012

Feb 08 | Computerworld | Chip maker hopes to bring CPU-GPU processors to servers in two years. Read more...

Graphene Transistors That Work at Blistering Speeds

Feb 05 | Technology Review | IBM has created graphene transistors that leave silicon ones in the dust. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

Virtualization for Aggregation And The vSMP Architecture™

Jan 12 | | In-depth look at vSMP Foundation server virtualization technology, technical implementation, use cases and capabilities. The technical whitepaper provides an architectural overview and details on the three vSMP Foundation products: vSMP Foundation for SMP, vSMP Foundation for Cluster and vSMP Foundation for Cloud.

Copper Cable Technologies for High Performance Computing

Jan 18 | | This white paper discusses Gore’s copper cable assemblies, and how they continue to exceed the standards for providing reliable, cost-effective solutions for high-performance computer applications.

Appro Assists LLNL with Cluster Designed for Extreme Scale Visualization

Jan 11 | | LLNL is home to some of the fastest computers in the world. In 2012, LLNL expects to have the Sequoia supercomputing cluster operational with a projected performance of over 20 PFLOP/s. These systems will focus on strengthening the foundations of predictive simulation through running large suites of complex simulations and then comparing model predictions with experimental data. To visualize this project’s large amount of data, LLNL requested an Appro Supercomputing Cluster specifically designed to support interactive data analysis.

View the White Paper Library

Multimedia

Webcast: Virtualized Data Center Roundtable

Join this online panel discussion for live Q&A with leading industry experts, analysts, and end-users to discuss the latest innovations, best practices, barriers to implementation, and measurable benefits of server virtualization with a particular focus on today's real world solutions.

Webcast: Watch SC09 Birds of a Feather Video: Scalable Fault-Tolerant HPC Supercomputers

Learn about scalable fault-tolerant architectures and examples of energy efficient and scalable supercomputing clusters using dual QDR InfiniBand to combine capacity computing with network failover capabilities with the help of programming languages such as MPI and a robust Linux cluster management package.

Webcast: High Performance Computing for a Smarter Planet

LIVE@SCO9: The IBM team discusses new innovations in hardware, software and services that help clients better understand their workloads and get insight from their R&D efforts. Technology demonstrations include the soon-to-be-released Power7 HPC processor, the DCS990 system with 2.4 petabytes of storage, the xCAT management tool, secure HPC cloud computing and more. Winners of two HPCwire Readers' and Editors’ Choice Awards! Take the IBM virtual tour at SC09 or more information go online to: http://www-03.ibm.com/systems/deepcomputing/sc09.html