SCIENCE

Appro today announced the deployment of a Data Intensive Testbed Cluster solution based on Appro servers configured with ioMemory technology from Fusion-io to extend the existing Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) Hyperion system. Hyperion is the world's largest Linux cluster dedicated test bed for development and testing of critical Linux cluster technologies.

LLNL created the Testbed solution for the National Nuclear Security Administration's Advanced Simulation and Computing program's Hyperion initiative, a project designed to accelerate the development of the high performance computing capabilities needed to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation's aging nuclear deterrent without underground testing. The Hyperion project will provide three critical objectives for high performance computing projects. First, it will enable computational scientists to have IO test beds for scalable parallel file systems such as Lustre and CEPH.  Secondly, it will allow the evaluation of large scale checkpoint restart mechanisms that don't depend on global scalable file systems.  Thirdly, it will facilitate investigation of cloud base file systems and analysis tools such as HADOOP and MAPREDUCE.

"The Hyperion project enables the development and scaling of critical Linux cluster technologies be able to meet current and future scientific computing requirements.  This project will allow us to apply more powerful computational resources to the broader set of Department of Energy and National Nuclear Security Administration missions we support, from national and homeland security to climate change and finding new energy sources," Mark Seager, Head of Advanced Computing Technology, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "When deployed the LLNL cluster solution will be one of the world's fastest I/O clusters dedicated to testing and scaling of critical Linux cluster technologies.  The performance of this solution for bandwidth and IOPS comes at a fraction of the cost of alternative technologies."

"Appro is pleased to provide Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory with the Appro Linux cluster solution to support the Hyperion project to support the largest Linux Cluster Testbed system in the world. This cluster solution will enable various highly important national security projects while pushing the state-of-the-art in scientific computing," said John Lee, VP of Advanced Technologies Solutions at Appro.

The Linux cluster solution consists of 80 Appro 1U 1423X, dual socket customized server based on Intel Xeon processor 5600 series with 24 GB of memory and 4 PCIe2 x8 slots.  The cluster will be integrated with 2x ioSAN carrier cards with 320 GB of FLASH memory and one 10Gb/s Ethernet and one IBA QDR (40Gb/s) link.  The I/O nodes also have 2x 1Gb/s Ethernet links for low speed cloud file system I/O and two SATA disks for speed comparisons.  In addition to these IO nodes, 28 Lustre OSS 1U Appro 1U 1423X dual socket nodes with 24 GB of memory, one Mellanox Connect-X card, 10Gb/s Ethernet and QDR IBA (40Gb/s) links and 2 SATA drives will be added. The entire solution will provide 80 Appro server nodes powered by Fusion-io technology delivering an aggregate 4KB IOPS rate of over 40 million IOPS and 320 GB/s of IO bandwidth and 102 TB of FLASH memory capabilities.

The higher end of the HPC market grew 25% even in the difficult recession year of 2009 and IDC projects that it will continue to see healthy growth potentially for the next decade as more countries and organizations apply very large HPC systems to address leading scientific and engineering problems," said Steve Conway, IDC Research Vice President for High Performance Computing. "The HPC cluster solution provided by Appro and Fusion I/O is designed to give LLNL users significantly more memory and high-speed connections to Lustre than they have had on previous LLNL clusters. In addition, this solution dedicated to testing and scaling is designed to be one of the world's fastest IO clusters in terms of bandwidth and IOPS critical for improving Linux cluster technologies."