APPLICATIONS
San Diego Supercomputer Center announces 'Triton Resource'
- The Data Oasis high performance storage system will assist in the practical manipulation of data across high-bandwidth paths to researchers throughout UC San Diego and the statewide UC system. This system will be fundamental to the life cycle of data including storage, management, and preservation of the deluge of data coming from research instruments and experiments that form the basis for future generations of research results. The storage facility is envisioned as having 2-4 petabytes of raw disc space including room to replicate all data.
- The Petascale Data Analysis Facility will be capable of analyzing data from the new generation of petascale computers (where one ‘petaflop’ of compute power equals one quadrillion calculations per second). This facility will address the critical need to make sense of the massive amounts of research data generated by today’s scientific instruments and high-performance computers. Preliminary specifications call for it to contain numerous large-memory or “fat” nodes, and multiple connections to storage. Using this architecture, a single node should be filled in about 60 seconds, so that large-scale data sets can quickly and easily be brought into memory, manipulated, and written out to disk.
- The scalable, shared resource “condo” cluster, or group of linked computers, will be equipped with standard compute nodes but enhanced memory capability. The cluster may be configured to operate either in a standard batch mode, or be set up to allow users to run customized software stacks at scale, with full connectivity to large-scale storage. This launch system may also serve as a “cloud” resource, and will provide a foundation for UC San Diego researchers to add individual project resources to create a shared computational facility that is professionally managed, expandable, and supports both everyday and “heroic” simulation, modeling, analysis, and computation needed for 21st century research and education.
Connectivity for the Triton Resource for UC San Diego campus laboratories will be achieved through both production and research multi-10 Gigabit networks to allow for unprecedented integration into research laboratories. Connectivity for UC researchers elsewhere will be achieved using a 10 Gigabit Ethernet campus connection completed in 2005 in a partnership with the Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC). The network was one of the first of its kind in the United States, and is connected to CENIC's high-performance backbone network, CalREN. The link provides state-of-the-art wide area network capacity to UC San Diego’s students, faculty, and staff, while also serving researchers who have extreme needs for large-scale data transfer and more powerful distributed collaboration. The Triton Resource program -- named after the mythical sea god and his three-pronged trident, whose image was adopted by UC San Diego as its mascot in 1964 -- was announced by Berman as part of the dedication ceremonies for the supercomputer center’s 80,000 square-foot building addition, which will double the size of the existing facility on the northwest end of campus. The new addition, which includes a second data center at SDSC and expands a facility that is already one of the largest academic data centers in the world, incorporates innovative engineering approaches aimed at increasing the overall efficiency levels of data centers on UC campuses and elsewhere.