EARTH SCIENCES

Exceeding 2.5 Gigabytes per second of sustained bandwidth for end to end file services, Bull has broken the world record for single-system SAN/NAS performance using DataDirect Networks' S2A8500 and a NovaScale NAS gateway. The SAN/NAS storage system combined two of DataDirect's state of the art S2A8500 block-level storage appliances tightly coupled with the NovaScale server and the Lustre object-based global parallel file system. The multi-processing parallelism of the S2A8500 architecture, with 28 fibre-channel ports individually powered by dedicated processors, enabled very high bandwidth aggregation, and eliminated the contention and bottlenecks between the storage-based block level layer, the server processing layer and the file system. This open and incredibly scalable approach paves the way for the next generation of supercomputing. "The ability to effortlessly combine SAN and NAS provided by our S2A storage appliances is helping our customers achieve an order-of-magnitude performance gain in their scalable file server NAS applications for high-performance computing," said Dave Fellinger, CTO of DataDirect Networks. "We are pleased that the combination of our S2A storage appliance with the open-architecture Bull NovaScale servers running Linux, and the Lustre parallel file system result in a balanced, reliable and robust SAN/NAS system architecture that will enable our customers to build systems undreamed of only a few years ago," he added. "Bull has chosen DataDirect S2A appliances and the Lustre file system as its high end storage solution for clustered file systems. With Lustre and S2A storage appliances powering our Bull NovaScale servers, we can offer customers both the computing power and the I/O bandwidth required for most of the HPC applications," said Jean-Frangois Lavignon, Bull HPC manager. "This achievement confirms that Lustre is the file system of choice for extreme High Performance Computing. We optimize Lustre's performance features on Bull NovaScale servers to achieve this unbelievable throughput, and Bull's customers will benefit from this close collaboration," said Peter Braam, President and CTO of Cluster File Systems. DataDirect Networks' Fibre Channel and SATA S2A are the world's highest performance storage systems, as well as the world's most cost efficient solutions for High Performance Computing and Rich Media applications. The S2A architecture is capable of delivering up to 1.5 GBytes/sec of raw sustained throughput in reads or writes from a single target via advanced disk and host parallelism, and hundreds of Gigabytes per second of aggregate performance in a computer cluster implementation. In use in three of the five top clusters, and eight of the top twenty as listed in the Top500 Supercomputer Sites, DataDirect has major installations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, NCSA, NOAA, NASA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and many others.