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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Special Features:
SDSC'S DATA ACCESS TECHNOLOGY
NAMED 'BIGGEST AND FASTEST'
The San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) announced that its Data Access
technology has received the "Biggest, Fastest in the West" award from the
Corporation for Education Network Initiatives in California (CENIC).
On March 15 at CENIC's 2004 annual conference, the award will be presented
to
Patricia Kovatch of SDSC and Roger Haskin of IBM for their team's joint
efforts in making Grid computing a practical reality. SDSC and IBM worked to
together to create the award-winning technology -- a shared parallel file
system with high-speed data throughput to make the on-demand infrastructure
possible so data can be shared efficiently, seamlessly and effectively between
sites on a Grid computing system.
"Many scientific applications create large amounts of data. For example,
UCLA
researchers running 3-D scans of functioning human brains typically store a
thousand gigabytes of data per hour," said Patricia Kovatch, high-performance
computing team leader at SDSC. "To take advantage of different computational
resources, scientists analyze, visualize, mine and store this data at many
different Grid sites. With SDSC's on-demand infrastructure, scientists now
have the ability to access and use this data anywhere on the Grid, from
anywhere on the Grid, at high speed."
At the recent SC2003 supercomputing conference, the team demonstrated the
power of this General Parallel File System (GPFS) technology by accessing an
80-terabyte GPFS file system located in San Diego from forty nodes in Phoenix.
Using a data link that sent messages at 10 billion bits per second (10
gigabits), they showed a sustained bandwidth of more than one billion bytes
per second over a 90-minute session, allowing researchers to create in real
time a visualization of complex seismological data representing the spread of
earthquake shock waves.
"This performance was truly remarkable by previous standards, approximately
90
percent of 'raw' wire speed, even better than that seen by specialized
applications," Kovach said. "On top of that, we had a truly transparent
access mechanism. IBM's GPFS allowed us to realize the dream of Grid
computing by making geographically distributed resources appear local to every
site. This ability to access data from anywhere on demand with a standard,
easy interface revolutionizes the way that our scientists and researchers
process and share data."
"Accessing storage over long distances has the potential to transform
science
in the same way that the Web has transformed business, since it makes data
availability ubiquitous," Haskin said. "It's really exciting to accomplish
this with an institution of the stature of the San Diego Supercomputer
Center."
SDSC will be recognized on March 15 at the On the Road to Gigabit Awards
luncheon held at The Ritz-Carlton, Marina Del Rey, California in conjunction
with the CENIC 2004 annual conference. The "One Gigabit or Bust" Initiative,
the nonprofit educational organization is focused on bringing one gigabit
broadband -- network capacity that is 1,000 times faster than today's Internet
-- to every school, business, and home throughout the state by 2010. CENIC and
California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology
(Cal-[IT]2) co-sponsor annual "On the Road to a Gigabit" awards that spotlight
the efforts of industry, academia, government, and community organizations in
applying ultra-high-performance network technology in innovative ways.
CENIC recognized the benefits to computing in California. "On demand" file
access saves time and money by not duplicating available remote storage
resources locally. And the transparent access to data and computing resources
will encourage widespread acceptance of Grids by users, giving a variety of
institutions equal and easy access to data to leverage California's resources
efficiently.
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