HPCwire: Indiana University Announces Lustre over WAN

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

Leading HPC
Solution Providers

HPCwire >> Topic >> Networks

April 29, 2008

Indiana University Announces Lustre over WAN

SONOMA, Calif., April 29 -- University Information Technology Services (UITS) at Indiana University announced today that it has dedicated over 350 terabytes (TB) of new storage platforms to support collaborative research projects mounting the Lustre file system across the TeraGrid network and other national high speed networks. IU's Data Capacitor Project Lead Stephen Simms made the announcement during a panel discussion at the Sun Microsystems-sponsored 2008 Lustre User Group being held this week in Sonoma, California.

The ability to use Lustre over a wide area network (WAN) is a significant advancement in the ongoing struggle to meet user demand for easier and faster access to stored research data generated by high performance computers.

"A large impediment to maintaining a wide area file system that spans multiple organizations is the need for a unified user identification scheme across all clients," said Simms, who also serves as IU's TeraGrid site lead.

Through small modifications to the Lustre code base, Indiana University -- with help from DataDirect Networks -- has recently developed a lightweight scheme for mapping user IDs (UIDs) across multiple distributed clients, ensuring that file ownership permissions will remain consistent across all clients.

This development is a critical step toward widespread use of Lustre as a wide area file system, and will provide greater security and ease of use. Early Lustre WAN projects required strict synchronization of UIDs between client systems; IU's UID mapping scheme eliminates the need for this strict synchronization. Implementation of this new code will grant appropriate access to only those client UIDs that have been registered with the Lustre administrator.

Indiana University has made several notable achievements related to the use of Lustre over a WAN in the past year. In June, IU announced that its Data Capacitor -- a 535 TB Lustre file system designed to store and manipulate large data sets -- demonstrated in its opening weeks of production a single client transfer rate of 977 MB per second across the TeraGrid network. In November, a team led by Indiana University was awarded first place in the annual Bandwidth Challenge at the SC07 Conference in Reno, Nevada; using the Data Capacitor, the IU team achieved a peak transfer rate of 18.21 Gigabits/second out of a possible 20 Gigabits/second. This performance was nearly twice the peak rate of the nearest competitor.

"Indiana University has had amazing success using Lustre in the last several months," said Simms. "We've shown how the Data Capacitor allows researchers to access, manage, and manipulate massive data sets quickly and easily from remote locations. We are very excited to extend that work and offer a new resource dedicated to wide area collaborations."

The Data Capacitor project is supported in part by the National Science Foundation under NSF Award Number CNS0521433 (Craig Stewart, PI; Stephen Simms, Co-PI and project manager; Caty Pilachowski, Randall Bramley and Beth Plale, Co-PIs). IU's involvement in the TeraGrid is supported in part by NSF grants ACI-0338618l, OCI-0451237, OCI-0535258, and OCI-0504075.

About UITS

University Information Technology Services at IU, with offices on the Bloomington and Indianapolis campuses, develops and maintains a modern information technology environment throughout the university in support of IU's vision for excellence in research, teaching, outreach, and lifelong learning. UITS provides tools and services to support the academic and administrative work of the university, including a high-speed campus network with wireless access, central web hosting, a rich selection of free and low-cost software for personal use, tools and support for instruction and research, and supercomputers for data analysis and visualization.

-----

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

'Coopetition' Helps the UK HPC Market Go 'Round

The size and diversity of the HPC market in the United States supports a varied set of system providers and integrators. But in Europe, and the United Kingdom in particular, the market has a different shape.
Read More...

The Week in Review

PRACE to evaluate petaflops prototypes; Acadamic roundtable discusses the computing industry's talent pool; and WRF benchmark data are released. John West recaps those stories and more in our weekly wrap-up.
Read More...

Semantic Supercomputing Reaps Competitive Advantage from Patent Data

Since the first patent was issued for a Venetian statue in 1471, 60 million patents have been awarded around the world, with four million patents actively in force today worldwide. And 800,000 new inventions are registered every year. While the data is public, current search tools are inconvenient and inadequate to the needs of professionals. Semantic supercomputing techniques are helping researchers tackle this difficult challenge.
Read More...

Read more HPCwire features...

Top Headlines

25 Years of Conventional Evaluation of Data Analysis Proves Worthless In Practice

Sep 05 | Uppsala University | Swedish researchers are revealing that "intelligent" computer-based methods for classifying patient samples is worthless when it comes to practical problems. Read more...

Three Dimensional Scans Could Revolutionise Brain Surgery

Sep 03 | Telegraph.co.uk | A new form of three dimensional scans could revolutionise brain surgery within a year, doctors claim. Read more...

Marching Penguins: Monitoring Your HPC Cluster

Sep 03 | Linux Magazine | In HPC, most attention is paid to utilization and performance, rather than service availability and problem notification. This article focuses on the latter Read more...

Big Data: Welcome to the Petacentre

Sep 03 | Nature News | What does it take to store bytes by the tens of thousands of trillions? Read more...

UD Scientist Finds Quicker Computer On-Ramp

Sep 01 | Delaware Online | In the world of supercomputer-powered science, speed is everything, and an open road can lead to the promised land. Read more...

Read more headlines...

Featured Whitepapers

SUSE® Linux Enterprise Server for High Performance Computing

Sep 05 | | The excellent scalability features of Linux, in addition to robust security and performance makes it an excellent choice for server systems, especially in the high performance computing area.

“Going Parallel - An Implementation Guide”

Sep 01 | | The paper outlines the basic steps and tools involved in the process of migrating a desktop application to a parallel environment.

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

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.

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...