Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Chapter 2
National Energy Research Scientific
Computing Center
Jason Hick
National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center, Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory
2.1
HPC at NERSC ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
5
2.2
I/O Hardware ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
6
2.2.1
Local Scratch File Systems ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
7
2.2.2
Storage Network :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
9
2.2.3
The NERSC Global File Systems :::::::::::::::::::::::
10
2.2.4
Archival Storage :::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
11
2.3
Workows, Workloads, and Applications ::::::::::::::::::::::::
12
2.4
Conclusion ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
14
Bibliography ::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
14
2.1 HPC at NERSC
The National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center is
the high-end scientific production computing facility for the Department of
Energy (DOE) Oce of Science (SC). It is located at the Lawrence Berkeley
National Laboratory in the San Francisco Bay Area and serves over 4,500 users
organized into about 700 projects. Scientists using the facility conduct a broad
range of scientic experiments and simulations using NERSC's computing and
storage resources.
NERSC's primary focus is maximizing user productivity for scientic gain
using the Center's computing and storage systems. User feedback guides de-
cisions on the particular systems and services that NERSC supports.
1
This
has proven extremely successful because, since 2008, NERSC users have co-
authored 1,500 journal publications per year on average and have contributed
recently to two Nobel Prizes [5]. In order to achieve high productivity, NERSC
1
NERSC was founded in 1974 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and moved
to Berkeley in 1996. For the past decade, NERSC has focused on a user-driven systems and
services model.
5
