Gary Grider, deputy division leader of the High Performance Computing (HPC) Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory, was awarded 2015 Richard P. Feynman Innovation Prize at a ceremony last week for his national leadership in developing cutting-edge HPC strategies and his innovative business partnerships. Grider is a leader in the HPC storage community and holds 12 patents and over 30 active patent applications in the area.
“Gary was a key contributor to two of the three dominant parallel clustered file systems in use today,” said Duncan McBranch, chief technology officer at Los Alamos. “His development of the Parallel Log-Structured File System (PLFS) and the concept of a Burst Buffer directly impacts the performance of the Trinity machine, our premier supercomputer for modeling and simulation. Our goal with the Feynman Innovation Prize is to recognize a Laboratory innovator with a distinguished record for both ideas and the ability to demonstrate their use in a way that benefits both our mission and U.S. industry.”
PLFS and Burst Buffer concepts invented at Los Alamos are being deployed at many DOE extreme-scale computing sites within the next three years, as well as at large commercial HPC sites through products produced by Intel, Data Direct Networks, IBM and Cray. These concepts, which came directly from a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with EMC Corp (now owned by Dell), are considered base technologies that will eliminate barriers to exascale class computing.
The award was presented to Grider as part LANL’s DisrupTech meeting on July 14. “Innovation is a critical part of our mission here at the Laboratory,” said Duncan McBranch, chief technology officer at Los Alamos. “Last year alone, principal investigators here disclosed 71 inventions, and the Lab filed 109 patent applications and 45 new copyright assertions. Innovation means converting these ideas into real-world solutions.”
New efforts led by Grider in the HPC field include research under a CRADA with Seagate to investigate power-managed storage devices and software solutions for deep data archiving.
Currently Grider is designing the MarFS storage system—the first of its kind to make cloud-style object storage usable by legacy HPC applications and users by enabling normal file system access with the file and folder concepts of data on scalable cloud storage systems. The MarFS project will demonstrate scaling to handle billions of files in one folder and tens of trillions of files in a file system, numbers previously thought impossible to reach. MarFS has been demonstrated at scale as cool storage for Trinity, and represents an important advance in levering cloud-based object storage for legacy HPC use.
Link to the full announcement on the LANL web site: http://www.lanl.gov/discover/news-release-archive/2016/July/07.19-feynman-center.php