PNNL
HPC 2014-15 | Storage
The US Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Washington, uses DDN’s storage solutions
their products from competitors. Noer said: ‘A Fortune 100 company expects an enterprise level of reliability and availability. Tey are using it for mixed workloads, for many different types of applications with many different groups of users at the same time, and so they need a level of reliability and availability that is much higher than would be provided in a typical scratch-space environment.’ Another strong area of growth for storage
companies has been oil and gas, as Noer highlighted: ‘Te compute and storage associated with the search and optimisation of oil and gas extraction is an enormous market for scale-out NAS. For Panasas as a whole, we ended 2013 with 70 per cent of business coming from the enterprise.’ New technical computing markets
are growing rapidly, and with that come increased storage needs. However, there are some new markets that demand similar capacity and performance. Noer said: ‘Life sciences used to be much more about storage capacity and less about storage performance but storage performance has become much more important in the last couple of years because of those trends and we are seeing the same thing in media.’
Te growth has knock-on effects within
the storage companies. Rector explained that DDN has been expanding its offices over recent years. DDN opened an office in Paris to focus on the development of the infinite memory engine (IME). Rector said: ‘It takes time, what DDN delivers is not trivial, we do a lot of workflow optimisation.’
“Storage performance has become much more important than capacity”
Seagate, and Xyratex before it, have been
engaging with enterprise markets through the ETP4HPC project. Just as in the USA the DoE report saw HPC as essential to future economic prosperity, so in the European Union, this industry-led forum hopes to use HPC to encourage growth in European industry and encourage the adoption of HPC in enterprise markets. Te ETP is funded from the Horizon 2020 programme, an EU- funded research and innovation programme. Xyratex has been involved with Horizon 2020 projects and was a founding member
of ETP4HPC. Claffey said: ‘Horizon 2020 is really aimed at driving the adoption of HPC technology throughout enterprise markets. What we are working on with the Horizon 2020 project is really looking forward to the exascale class systems. Here you need to provide a level of power efficiency, performance, and reliability that can scale to the meet the requirements of exascale computing. Te pressures from growing markets in
enterprise and traditional HPC are driving demand for extremely efficient compute and storage architectures. Price performance in particular is being driven by enterprise, while HPC needs to address fault tolerance and power efficiency to scale to petabytes and potentially exabytes in the near future. High throughput applications are already
pushing at the limit of what is achievable with today’s storage technology. A significant bottleneck can be the memory or cache used to move large data sets into compute architecture. Removing these bottlenecks has been an area of significant research for storage providers. Molly Rector, CMO for DDN said: ‘We
are thinking about how you can use your compute more efficiently, even though we
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