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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
IBM GPFS SCORES TOP MARKS IN
BANDWIDTH CHALLENGE AT SC2003
A large scale Grid environment built using IBM's General Parallel File
System
(GPFS) was named the Best Commercial Application in the Fourth Annual High
Performance Bandwidth Challenge at last week's Supercomputing Conference
(SC2003), demonstrating the important role that GPFS will play as major Grid
installations are deployed around the world in industry and commercial
environments. With GPFS, its now possible to rapidly transport huge amounts of
data around the world.
The Bandwidth Challenge asks contestants from science and engineering
research
communities to demonstrate emerging techniques or applications that consume
large amounts of network resources. IBM and the San Diego Supercomputing
Center (SDSC) won this year using GPFS in a large-scale Grid environment
spanning several sites and long distances. Using GPFS, each machine in the
distributed system has the same view of the file systems and can access the
same files simultaneously across the TeraGrid Wide Area Network.
"GPFS is indispensable as major Grid installations are deployed in growing
numbers," said Dave Turek, vice president of IBM Deep Computing. "This win has
positive implications for Grid deployments in all environments."
"We were extremely pleased with the performance achieved in this
distributed
file system, which we believe heralds a new paradigm for Grid computing, said
Phil Andrews, director of high performance computing for SDSC. "In this
approach, data transfers across a wide area network are completely transparent
to the user avoiding any changes to their normal mode of operation."
"This is first time we have used GPFS at multiple locations over the
TeraGrid
network," said Rob Pennington, director of NCSA's Computing and Data
Management Directorate. "We have now proven that machines scattered across the
country can be connected through a cyberinfrastructure like the TeraGrid and
work as one machine. GPFS is an important component in creating this virtual
machine."
The General Parallel File System is high-performance shared-disk file
system
that provides data access from all nodes in a Linux or UNIX cluster
environment. Parallel and serial applications can readily access shared files
using standard UNIX file system interfaces, and the same file can be accessed
concurrently from multiple nodes. GPFS provides high availability through
logging and replication, and can be configured for failover from both disk and
server malfunctions. Currently GPFS is deployed in clusters for applications
like weather simulations, engineering design, seismic analysis, digital
content creation and distribution and financial modeling.
GPFS is being implemented for computing systems at the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) and SDSC, both part of the TeraGrid system.
The TeraGrid is a National Science Foundation project to build and deploy the
world's largest, most comprehensive, distributed infrastructure for open
scientific research.
At the conference, SDSC exhibited a cluster of 40 Intel Itanium 2-based IBM
eServer xSeries systems, each connected to a Gigabit Ethernet LAN, which is
connected via a Force10 switch over the SCinet network.
During the SC2003 demonstration, GPFS was extended beyond the individual
machine rooms at the two centers and using IBM servers on the TeraGrid and
distributed among the SDSC and NCSA booths on the show floor, at SDSC, and at
NCSA (at University of Illinois). The demonstration showed how TeraGrid disk
servers at both centers move data across the TeraGrid network to compute nodes
in the booths, where the data can then be used by scientific applications.
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