Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
2.4 Conclusion
NERSC has a strong impact on the design and development of state-of-
the-art parallel storage systems that are valued by a broad set of users. The
Center pioneered the idea of global storage in building the NGF to enable users
to spend more time on science and less time moving and managing copies of
their data. They championed several features, most notably the ability to do
multi-clustering, which are currently in the GPFS software. NERSC continues
to actively participate in the HPSS collaboration and develop new features
as part of the collaboration to support high performance archiving. In all
monitoring usage, developing a user-centric approach to storage systems and
services works well.
In recent years, NERSC reached a practical limit in its ability to use large-
scale FC networks to support their global file system. Their current focus is
in building an IB storage network and advancing the routing and monitoring
features and capabilities of IB technology.
Trends show that users are demanding more of storage systems than they
can easily provide, be it non-optimal I/O workloads, or extreme bandwidth, or
capacity demands. The largest challenge NERSC sees is that this gap between
user need and storage system capability is widening. Flash is emerging as a new
tier of storage at HPC facilities and may eliminate the previously mentioned
gap, but file system software will need to make some fundamental changes
since all of the software was designed around disk systems. As a result, NERSC
is participating in the Fast Forward research and development project [7] with
other DOE laboratories, which aims to develop next-generation file systems
and advanced burst buffer technologies. Also, parallel storage systems are
growing in scale and complexity and, in order to remain user-centric, NERSC
is strongly working toward state-of-the-art I/O quality-of-service features that
do not exist today.
Bibliography
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[2] F. P. An, J. Z. Bai, A. B. Balantekin, H. R. Band, D. Beavis, W. Beriguete,
M. Bishai, S. Blyth, K. Boddy, R. L. Brown, et al. Observation of Electron-
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