Oak Ridge National Laboratory Selects DataDirect Networks Storage to Power One of the Largest & Fastest File Systems in the World
48 S2A9900 High Performance Storage Platforms Deliver Up to 240 Gigabytes per Second of Performance Across 10 Petabytes
DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest performance computing environments in the world, today announced that it has been selected by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to deliver one of the world's largest and fastest file systems. Codenamed "Spider," the system is designed to deliver up to 240 gigabytes per second of single Lustre file system performance and support multiple supercomputers as the underlying site-wide storage system for computational science. Spider is roughly twice as fast as the previous performance leader and stores over 10 petabytes of research data, equivalent to 1,000 copies of the printed contents in the U.S. Library of Congress.
Spider will also be servicing the I/O requirements of Jaguar--ORNL's new supercomputer--capable of delivering over 1,000 trillion calculations per second, or one petaflop. Jaguar is the first petaflop system to be delivered by Cray.
"We selected DDN after extensive internal testing," said Galen Shipman, Group Leader, Technology Integration, ORNL. "We are excited to be working with Cray and DDN on this project. Spider will provide a center-wide accessible storage system to the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF), therefore greatly enhancing our capability to deliver scientific insight."
The Spider system is unique in many ways; it is the world's fastest and largest POSIX-compliant file system and was built to support the I/O requirements of over 180,000 CPU computation cores. In addition, it is:
- Made up of 48 DDN S2A9900 high performance storage platforms
- Each S2A9900 is configured with 280 one terabyte hard disk drives
- Occupies 30 data center racks--each S2A9900 is only 24U and features DDN's ultra high-density 4U, 60-bay disk drive enclosures
- Configured with 13,440 one terabyte hard disk drives
- 13,440 terabytes of unformatted capacity
- 10,752 terabytes of formatted, usable capacity
- Connects with 192 Lustre storage servers into a single file system namespace
"We are honored to be selected by Oak Ridge for this monumental project," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DDN. "It is quite amazing to think that only three years ago DDN was celebrating a performance milestone by delivering 130 gigabytes per second of bandwidth, and now has been selected to nearly double this level of performance, breaking our record in the process. Being selected by ORNL validates the HPC focus and engineering design philosophy we have been building upon for over 10 years. It is extremely rewarding to see our solutions in action in one of the first petascale systems and we congratulate Oak Ridge on their continued success."
The selection of an independent storage system is a strategic initiative for ORNL. The Spider storage environment is de-coupled from the purchase and operation of ORNL computational systems, enabling it to be accessible during single supercomputer maintenance windows and allows the storage environment to evolve independently of the Lab's compute initiatives as a best-of-breed research storage foundation.
"ORNL has been working with DDN for many years," said Buddy Bland, LCF Project Director, ORNL. "Spider and Jaguar will enable breakthrough science at unprecedented scale. For example, all of the climate modeling data that went into the Nobel prize-winning climate report in 2008 would easily fit within Spider, easing the burden of data transfers for the analysis of this data."
ORNL is a multi-program science and technology laboratory managed for the U.S. Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. Scientists and engineers at ORNL conduct basic and applied research and development to create scientific knowledge and technological solutions that strengthen the nation's leadership in key areas of science. DDN storage platforms will be used in ORNL's computational science environment to improve the world. Some of these initiatives include: exploring the science of neurodegenerative disorders to help cure diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's; understanding the impact of climate change on every region of the globe; creating atomic-scale enzymes which can accelerate the production of biofuels to reduce the nation's dependency on foreign oil; and advancing the nation's understanding of "dark matter" which makes up most of the universe's mass.
With over 160 petabytes installed worldwide, DDN S2A solutions deliver more aggregate bandwidth to the Top500 Supercomputers than any other IT vendor, including six of the world's Top10, 28 of the Top 50 and 48 of the Top100 fastest supercomputers.
