Category Archives: Lustre File System

Future trends in HPC, part 1

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As we near the end of 2011, we take a moment to reflect on the past year. It’s been a busy year for IT across virtually all verticals, from mobile and search to enterprise servers and cloud computing. When we attended HPC360 a few weeks ago, we had the pleasure to attend a keynote presentation by Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect Research in which he discussed the most important trends in high performance computing (HPC).

HPC is an exciting and growing industry that ICC has been moving into the past couple years. The traditional HPC space revolved around high-end research facilities particularly in science and engineering. However, with each year technological innovations and tailored systems such as our Supermicro GPU Simcluster have brought the realm of HPC closer to reality for many small/medium-sized business and organizations.

In this 2-part series we will look at the top 10 future trends in HPC from Intersect360′s research, coupled with our own analysis and thoughts. No better way for us computer nerds to close the year right? Let’s get started.

Top 10 HPC Trends for 2012 and Beyond

Future Trends for High Performance Computing Image

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China builds the world’s fastest supercomputer

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Photo of Tianhe-1A supercomputer courtesy of NVIDIA.comAfter almost a year-long run, the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has relinquished its title as the world’s fastest computer. This honor now belongs to the Tianhe-1A supercomputer located in the National Supercomputing Center in Tianjin, China.

Tianhe-1A is expected to officially become the leader of the TOP500.org list of the world’s fastest supercomputers sometime in mid-November. It clocked an impressive 2.507 petaflops on the LINPACK scale, which is about the sum of the performance of supercomputers #6 to #10 on the Top 500 list, according to insideHPC. Jaguar, now the second most powerful supercomputer in the world, had a peak performance of about 1.75 petaflops.

Although Tianhe-1A may re-ignite the anxiety in the West that usually accompanies news of great achievements from East Asia, this is not the first time that America or Europe had lost the #1 place on the Top 500. In 2002, Japan captured the top spot with their Earth Simulator (ES) supercomputer, which remained the world’s fastest until September of 2004 when IBM’s Blue Gene/L cluster at Argonne National Laboratory surpassed it. The quasi-geopolitical competition for computing power is far from over, but China’s ascendancy is actually one of the less interesting things about Tianhe-1A.

Tianhe-1A can potentially usher in a new era in “personal supercomputing”. It is the first leader of the Top 500 to make extensive use of GPUs (Graphics Processing Units). In fact, it is comprised of 7,168 NVIDIA Tesla M2050 GPUs and 14,336 Intel CPUs. In comparison, Jaguar has 37,376 AMD CPUs and no GPUs.

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OpenSFS formed to lead development of Lustre file system

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Photo accessed on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Open_HDD_and_SSD.JPG)OpenSFS (Open Scalable File Systems, Inc.), a non-profit corporation, has recently been formed to continue development of the Lustre file system alongside Oracle, which owns and maintains the Lustre code even though it is an open-source technology.

Lustre has been and continues to be used by many high-performance clusters for managing storage systems. When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, the former owner of Lustre, earlier this year, they became the keepers of the Lustre source code. Oracle has been developing Lustre for its own hardware, but there is a large sector of Lustre users who have an interest in continuing to add their own functionality to the file system. Enter OpenSFS. While they are explicitly not seeking to branch off from Oracle’s Lustre project (they are doing the exact opposite, actually, in hoping to implement their modifications as future updates to Oracle Lustre) these groups are seeking to develop the file system for non-Oracle deployments.

Membership in the OpenSFS partnership, according to an HPC Wire article, is based upon contribution. For $5,000 a year, one can become a participant on a working group in OpenSFS; for $50,000 a year, one can manage a working group; for $500,000 a year, one can become a member of the board of executives. Currently about 20 organizations have become members in one form or another on OpenSFS. The founding members were Cray, Direct Data Networks, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (Lustre updates developed by OpenSFS will be tested first on supercomputers at the latter two locations).

This is an exciting development because it signals a strong effort to continue development of Lustre for applications beyond those needed by Oracle. Hopefully this will become an active community that will keep this heavily-deployed open-source project alive for many years to come.