SCIENCE

The Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) today announced a collaboration with Whamcloud, a venture-backed company formed from a worldwide network of high-performance computing (HPC) storage industry veterans.

Whamcloud will provide TACC with onsite engineering services related to Lustre, an open source parallel distributed file system found in more than half of the TOP500 (http://top500.org/) supercomputing sites. A Whamcloud Lustre engineer currently resides onsite at TACC and facilitates technology transfer from TACC’s Lustre manageability projects back into the Lustre community and Lustre codebase, enabling the open science community to benefit from TACC’s work. Conversely, technology innovations from the Lustre community will be transferred back to TACC where they will improve the performance of the center’s HPC systems.

The collaboration focuses on Lustre manageability because it is an area where TACC has particular expertise. TACC was one of the first advanced computing centers to utilize large-scale parallel Linux clusters. The work will also include recommendations for future administrative and performance enhancements.

"We're constantly building more powerful computing systems to enable new computational research discoveries, so we need file systems to continue to scale up in performance without sacrificing reliability,” said Jay Boisseau, director of TACC. “Working with Whamcloud, we expect to continue to scale Lustre to new levels while improving reliability and helping researchers use Lustre file systems more efficiently."

"TACC is known nationally and internationally as a center of supercomputing excellence,” said Brent Gorda, chief executive officer of Whamcloud. “We are excited to work together to push forward Lustre technology and build infrastructure that will continue to keep The University of Texas at Austin at the cutting edge of research for its students and faculty. Being onsite at TACC is an indication of how deep and important this partnership is."

For more information: http://www.tacc.utexas.edu and http://www.whamcloud.com/