Leaders of the Data Capacitor project team at Indiana University's Pervasive Technology Institute (PTI) have launched a partnership with technology startup Whamcloud to improve upon IU's pioneering work in the use of Lustre over Wide Area Networks (WANs).

In spring 2008, the IU Data Capacitor team started using Lustre in production across WANs as part of a service providing 350TB of storage for collaborative research projects mounting file systems across the TeraGrid network and other national high speed networks. This service has proven valuable to many types of scientific research including life sciences, environmental science, and astronomy -- all of which require teams of scientists to move, share, and access very large data sets among distant and remote locations.

With help from Whamcloud's team of expert Lustre networking technicians, the IU team hopes to increase the performance and reliability of their Lustre WAN service while exploring new ideas and methods for large-scale data management.

"Working with Whamcloud is a natural fit for us," said Stephen Simms, Data Capacitor project lead from PTI. "Eric Barton and Whamcloud's pool of talent have an enormous amount of Lustre networking experience. Their collaboration could help take the Data Capacitor project to an exciting new level."

The IU Data Capacitor is a high speed, high bandwidth storage system for research computing. It serves all IU campuses and is available to the national scientific research community via Internet2, National LambdaRail, and the TeraGrid -- the National Science Foundation's national network of supercomputing resources for which IU serves as a Resource Provider.

The Data Capacitor allows users to access very large, remote data files as if the file system were mounted locally. It also bridges multiple geographically distributed resources to allow new workflow opportunities, doing away with cumbersome data transfer techniques.

"Working with Indiana University is a privilege. It's an opportunity to extend WAN file system performance with an incredibly knowledgeable and talented partner," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "We very excited about the opportunity to do cutting-edge work with the IU team to improve Lustre's performance and reliability on WANs."

The Data Capacitor's wide area functionality currently supports several nationally funded research projects, helping to move and manage massive data sets related to polar ice sheet exploration, Alzheimer's Disease research, and research on planetary formation.

"The Whamcloud partnership could help to open up the Data Capacitor for a wide range of new scientific projects and users," said Simms. "The ability to quickly and easily move and manipulate large data sets has become essential to scientific discovery, and the Lustre-powered Data Capacitor has proven to be a very powerful tool for this purpose. If we can hone our ability to offer it over a wide area network, the value to scientific research could be exceptional."