ACADEMIA

Spider up and crawling: NCCS users will find it easier to manage the data files from their calculations with the advent of a new center-wide shared file system that saves all files to one location. "Spider" (as it has been named) will replace multiple islands of file systems in various locations on the NCCS network with a single scalable system that eventually will serve all the NCCS systems and will connect to the InfiniBand and Ethernet internal networks. Because all simulation data will eventually reside on Spider, users will not need to transfer files among multiple computers and data management systems. By the end of 2008, Spider will have been expanded to support the petaflop computer, which will use the new file management system exclusively and will have no local scratch files. At that point, Spider will provide 10 PB of storage space and over 200 GB per second of bandwidth and will be mounted on all major NCCS systems. Deployment of Spider will be a welcome development for researchers. Having a single repository of simulation data will increase their productivity, allowing more time to pursue research goals. By simplifying the use of the data analysis and visualization tools, it may encourage more researchers to take advantage of them and thus increase the value of their data.