PROCESSORS

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) will team with the Advanced Simulation and Computing Programs (ASCI) at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Sandia National Laboratories, and the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) in the Fourth Annual High Performance Bandwidth Challenge at SC2003 in Phoenix (Nov. 15-21). The partners' groundbreaking entry will demonstrate a very high bandwidth, globally distributed cluster file system. During the Bandwidth Challenge--sponsored by SCinet, the SC conference networking infrastructure, and Qwest Communications--applicants from around the world are urged to test the limits of the SCinet network while demonstrating innovative techniques or applications. The Challenge presents awards in a variety of categories, from "highest performing application" to "most efficient use of available bandwidth." The NCSA/ASCI/SDSC entry is in the "most innovative" category. During the demonstration, the LLNL I/O application IOR will be run across four locations: the NCSA, ASCI and SDSC booths on the SC03 conference floor and a Linux cluster in the NCSA machine room at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The Lustre File System, developed by Cluster File Systems, Inc., is key; it allows the widely distributed computing nodes of the system to access the Data Direct data storage capabilities distributed between the ASCI booth and NCSA in Urbana-Champaign. In addition, the demonstration will highlight file system interoperability between IA-32 and 64-bit Itanium 2 systems. This will be one of the first trials of a wide area cluster file system with a real I/O application--a fundamental element for grid computing. "The technology has evolved to the point that every compute node in your local center can now read and write to the same file system. Moreover, this can also be done over the wide area network," said Michelle Butler, head of NCSA's Storage Enabling Technologies group. "These are groundbreaking technologies bringing data centers from across the country together with a common file system." "The Bandwidth Challenge will showcase how NCSA and our partners have been able to prove the scalability and performance of our architecture in production environments," said Peter Braam, president and chief technology officer of Cluster File Systems. "This demonstration also illustrates another key benefit of Lustre—its support for interoperability between a wide variety of industry-standard protocols and commodity hardware." Bandwidth challenge presentations will be 10:30 a.m. to noon on Tuesday, Nov 18 in rooms 40-41 at the Phoenix Civic Plaza Convention Center. Awards will be announced at 1:30 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 20 in the center's ballroom.