Tuesday, December 9, 2014

LRZ HPC Cluster Storage Systems

I thought I pen down the LRZ HPC Cluster Storage Systems usage of NetApp and GPFS File System to support their computing needs.

Storage Systems
SuperMUC has a powerful I/O-Subsystem which helps to process large amounts of data generated by simulations.

Home file systems
Permanent storage for data and programs is provided by a 16-node NAS cluster from Netapp. This primary cluster has a capacity of 2 Petabytes and has demonstrated an aggregated throughput of more than 10 GB/s using NFSv3. Netapp's Ontap 8 "Cluster-mode" provides a single namespace for several hundred project volumes on the system. Users can access multiple snapshots of data in their home directories.

Data is regularly replicated to a separate 4-node Netapp cluster with another 2 PB of storage for recovery purposes. Replication uses Snapmirror-technology and runs with up to 2 GB/s in this setup.

Storage hardware consists of >3400 SATA-Disks with 2 TB each protected by double-parity RAID and integrated checksum


Work and Scratch areas
For highest-performance checkpoint I/O IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) with 10 PB of capacity and an aggregated throughput of 200 GB/s is available. Disk storage subsystems were built by DDN.


References:
  1.  SuperMUC Petascale System

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