Scientific Computing Seminar

Date:
Friday, June 4, 2004
Time:
1:00pm-2:00pm
Location:
50A-5132
Seminar Speaker:
Greg Butler
NERSC, LBNL
Title:
The GUPFS Project at NERSC
Abstract:
The Global Unified Parallel File System (GUPFS) project is a multiple-phase, multi-year project at the National Energy Research Scientific Computing (NERSC) Center whose goal is to deploy a scalable, high-performance, high-bandwidth, shared file system for all NERSC production computing and support systems. The primary purpose of the GUPFS project is to make it easier to conduct advanced scientific research at NERSC by simplifying the scientists' data management tasks and maximizing storage and data availability. This is to be accomplished through the use of a center-wide shared file system providing a unified file namespace, operating on consolidated shared storage that is accessed by all the NERSC production systems.

In order to successfully deploy a scalable high-performance shared file system with consolidated disk storage, three major emerging technologies must be brought together: (1) shared/cluster file systems, (2) cost-effective, high-performance storage area network (SAN) fabrics, and (3) high-performance storage devices. The GUPFS project has been conducting evaluations of these technologies and is currently working on deployment planning.

This talk presents an overview of the GUPFS project, its goals and vision, its evaluation methodology, and some of the results of the technology evaluations conducted to date, and the insights gained from them. It was originally presented at the 12th NASA Goddard/21st IEEE Conference on Mass Storage Systems & Technologies in April 2004, and is available on the GUPFS project web site at http://hpcf.nersc.gov/projects/GUPFS

Sponsor of Seminar:
James Craw
Scientific Computing

Contact Esmond G. Ng EGNg@lbl.gov