• A New Architecture For NVM-Express

    January 18, 2018

    NVM-Express is the latest hot thing in storage, with server and storage array vendors big and small making a mad dash to bring the protocol into their products and get an advantage in what promises to be a fast-growing market.

    With the rapid rise in the amount of data being generated and processed, and the growth of such technologies as artificial intelligence and machine learning in managing and processing the data, demand for faster speeds and lower latency in flash and other non-volatile memory will continue to increase in the coming years, and established companies like Dell EMC, NetApp …

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  • Intel Shuts Down Lustre File System Business

    April 20, 2017

    Chip maker Intel is getting out of the business of trying to make money with a commercially supported release of the high-end Lustre parallel file system. Lustre is commonly used at HPC centers and is increasingly deployed by enterprises to take on their biggest file system jobs.

    But don’t jump too far to any other conclusions. The core development and support team, minus a few key people who have already left, remains at Intel and will be working on Lustre for the foreseeable future.

    Intel quietly announced its plans to shutter its Lustre commercialization efforts in a posting earlier this …

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  • One Small Shop, One Extreme HPC Storage Challenge

    February 7, 2017

    Being at the bleeding edge of computing in the life sciences does not always mean operating at extreme scale. For some shops, advancements in new data-generating scientific tools requires forward thinking at the infrastructure level—even if it doesn’t require a massive cluster with exotic architectures. We tend to cover much of what happens at the extreme scale of computing here, but it’s worth stepping back and observing how dramatic problems in HPC are addressed in much smaller environments.

    This “small shop, big problem” situation is familiar to the Van Andel Research Institute (VARI), which recently moved from a genomics and …

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  • DDN Turns The Crank On “Wolfcreek” Storage

    November 8, 2016

    In the high performance computing arena, the stress is always on performance. Anything and everything that can be done to try to make data retrieval and processing faster ultimately adds up to better simulations and models that more accurately reflect the reality we are trying to recreate and often cast forward in time to figure out what will happen next.

    Pushing performance is an interesting challenge here at the beginning of the 21st century, since a lot of server and storage components are commoditized and therefore available to others. The real engineering is coming up with innovative ways of putting …

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  • ARM, Open Source Feed Buzz Around HPC File System

    February 24, 2016

    There is but a small cadre of scalable parallel file systems and while the list might be small, weighing the relative benefits of each option against the available resources can be a challenge, as Sven Breuner and his HPC admin colleagues at the Fraunhofer Institute realized in 2004.

    They were certainly not the first or last organization to labor over the inevitable question of which of these scalable parallel file systems to choose, but they did take an interesting route. Notably, the limited choices have not changed over those years, either—nor have the list complaints about each.

    To be more …

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  • Panasas Expands Reach Beyond HPC Foundations

    August 14, 2015

    For any company in the high performance computing storage market, sixteen years is quite a run. Still private and still growing past its early years as a venture-backed, scale-out NAS company, Sunnyvale-based Panasas has managed to carve out a niche at the highest end of computing—and has turned an eye to the broader world of high performance commercial markets.

    With approximately 150 employees, Panasas is still led by the company’s founder and chief scientist, Garth Gibson, who raised the small company through the HPC storage ranks in the early 2000s to its stable position today. The basis for the Panasas …

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  • What Stands in the Way of Enterprise Lustre Adoption?

    March 3, 2015

    As we described in detail in the previous section of this series on the state of Lustre and the roadmap for the parallel file system, beyond traditional HPC, the file system has some weaknesses for large-scale enterprise shops. These tend to come down to a matter of support, especially when compared to its closest rival, GPFS.

    Like a number of other vendors who sell storage systems backed both GPFS and Lustre across different product lines, DataDirect Networks (DDN) says that across the 10 to 12 different verticals they track with either a traditional or commercial HPC component, they are always …

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