HPCwire: Petascale Storage System to Be Built at MIT

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

HPCwire >> Off the Wire

May 19, 2006

Petascale Storage System to Be Built at MIT

One of the largest and highest performance data storage arrays in the world is under construction at the Media Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). The storage array will be used to collect and analyze video and audio data for a research project designed to better understand early childhood cognitive development. In a break with conventional large-scale storage architectures, the Media Lab array is being constructed with building blocks based on Zetera Corp.'s Z-SAN technology. The project is a collaboration between four companies: Bell Microproducts, Marvell, Seagate and Zetera, a private company.

Since its inception in mid-2005, the Media Lab's Human Speechome Project, led by Deb Roy, has been amassing several terabytes per week of digital audio and video (A/V) recordings of early childhood learning and socialization data. These massive quantities of A/V data will be processed and analyzed using a suite of innovative data mining tools that Professor Roy and his team have been developing. By mid-2008, the information will have been assembled into a database exceeding 1 petabyte (1,000 TB) in total capacity. The speech and video data will be processed and analyzed by several hundred parallel processing devices in one of the most extensive scientific analyses of long-term infant learning patterns ever undertaken. Speech and video mining technologies emerging from this research will impact multimedia data management, business intelligence and securities industries.

The data storage requirements of the Human Speechome Project present challenges that cannot be easily addressed with conventional storage technologies. Basic requirements include high-performance reads/writes in excess of 160 Gbps, massive shared volumes in excess of several hundred terabytes, and smooth scalability from an initial 50 TB to capacity well in excess of a petabyte. Additional requirements include 100 percent data redundancy, file access by computers running multiple operating systems, a fully virtualized storage fabric, and affordability using low-cost, high capacity SATA hard drives.

The Media Lab's Human Speechome Project storage solution is the result of a corporate collaboration that is committed to delivering storage that is simultaneously less expensive, higher performance, easier to use and more scalable. The core technology from Zetera is called Z-SAN, and uses Internetwork Protocol (IP) as the storage fabric.

The Z-Rack storage enclosures come from Bell Microproducts' Hammer Storage division, and aggregates for capacity and performance using Ethernet switches. Z-Rack is part of Hammer's Z-Series product family, which was recently launched incorporating Zetera's Z-SAN architecture into solutions for the enterprise sector. Hammer partnered with Zetera and Seagate to bring the Z-Series to market, providing storage that is faster, more scalable, easier to manage and less expensive.

Marvell supplies the Storage over Internetworking Protocol (SoIP) processing nodes and XGE connectivity mesh. The Marvell Orion processor plus Marvell Prestera edge and core XGE Ethernet switches enable reliable petabyte storage and terabit input/output (I/O) bandwidth scalability. When fully constructed, the Media Lab array will be analogous to today's largest supercomputers. As such, the Media Lab array will be among the very first live terabit systems to fully exercise commercially available Marvell XGE Ethernet-based backbone switching technology. The SATA hard disk drives come from Seagate.

When fully built out, the Human Speechome Project computing infrastructure is expected to be composed of more than 3,000 Seagate SATA drives, more than 300 Hammer Z-Rack storage enclosures, more than 100 Marvell-based 10G/GbE switches, and about 400 blade processors. high-performance storage I/O anticipates the processing of 700 TB of data during each 12-hour overnight analytical run. To achieve the desired performance requirements, 150-drive stripes (aggregated virtual volumes) will be created using the native virtualization capabilities of Z-SAN. Protection against data loss will be delivered through RAID 10 mirrors (duplicate copies) of the raw video data, transform data, and metadata files.

The Human Speechome Project is supported in part by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

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

C-DAC announces plans for a petaflop system; IBM researchers are working on vertical integration techniques to extend Moore's Law another 15 years. We recap those stories and more in our weekly wrapup.
Read More...

Moscow State University Supercomputer Has Petaflop Aspirations

The Moscow State University supercomputer, Lomonosov, has been selected for a high-performance makeover, with the goal of tripling its processing power to achieve petaflop-level performance in 2010. T-Platforms, who developed and manufactured the supercomputer, is the odds-on favorite to lead the project.
Read More...

Intel Ups Performance Ante with Westmere Server Chips

Right on schedule, Intel has launched its Xeon 5600 processors, codenamed "Westmere EP." The 5600 represents the 32nm sequel to the Xeon 5500 (Nehalem EP) for dual-socket servers. Intel is touting better performance and energy efficiency, along with new security features, as the big selling points of the new Xeons.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

Australia Commissions Cray Supercomputer

Mar 19 | OfficialWire | New super to support intelligence work Down Under. Read more...

Intel Partners See 'Easy' Upgrade Path With Xeon 5600 Chips

Mar 18 | ChannelWeb | Westmere parts already showing up in HPC machines. Read more...

AMD: OEMs primed for Opteron 6100s

Mar 17 | The Register | But what about the tier ones? Read more...

Arrival of the Desktop Supercomputer

Mar 17 | Cadalyst Magazine | A new generation of workstations is changing the nature of technical computing. Read more...

Scheduling HPC In The Cloud

Mar 17 | Linux Magazine | Latest iteration of Sun Grid Engine able to tap into Cloud. 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.

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