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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY /
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Breaking News - Storage:
Voltaire Advances High Performance Storage For Grid Computing
Voltaire, a provider of interconnect solutions for high performance Grid
computing, announced several new solutions that enable high performance
storage on clusters and Grids. The solutions, which include parallel file
systems and scalable clustered NAS over InfiniBand, deliver extremely high I/O
bandwidth reducing storage overhead and increasing the application processing
power of every server node in the cluster. Designed for use with the Voltaire
InfiniBand Switch Router family including the Voltaire ISR 9288, a 288 port
InfiniBand switch, HPC customers can build scalable clusters of hundreds to
thousands of nodes with better server utilization and increased performance.
To offer scalable file I/O for clusters, Voltaire has integrated its Grid
interconnect solutions with multiple parallel file system solutions. The first
two to be supported are PVFS2 (Parallel Virtual File System 2), an open source
software solution used in high performance computing environments, and
Terrascale's TerraGrid parallel I/O platform, a commercial software solution
that transforms standard Linux file systems such as ext2 into scalable
parallel file systems. For customers requiring large scale network file system
(NFS) solutions, Voltaire also introduced a highly scalable, clustered NAS
solution that combines Terrascale's TerraGrid middleware and Voltaire's
interconnect solutions. The solutions are ideally suited to improve
performance of data intensive applications used in industries such as
manufacturing, oil and gas exploration, government, financial services,
bioinformatics and the scientific community.
"InfiniBand has already improved the performance of clusters and Grids
dramatically," said Arun Jain, vice president of marketing at Voltaire. "Now,
it is time to advance clustering beyond high performance interprocessor
communication and extend the power of InfiniBand to storage networking.
Through our partnerships with leading storage innovators and tested
integration with open source offerings, Voltaire now has a wealth of solutions
to enable powerful storage I/O for enterprise and HPC clusters and Grids."
Eliminating The Storage Bottleneck With Scalable File I/O Solutions
PVFS2 is a new parallel and clustered file system that enables scalable I/O
for large HPC clusters. Specifically designed for large scale cluster systems,
PVFS2 uses a stateless design that reduces the risk of cascading failures and
the resources required for clustering large numbers of nodes. Used in
combination with Voltaire's interconnect solutions, customer can now deploy
file systems that can scale to thousands of nodes with total file storage
capabilities of multiple petabytes.
"We've used our 128 node Voltaire InfiniBand cluster to port PVFS2 to run over
InfiniBand," said Pete Wyckoff, research scientist at the Ohio Supercomputer
Center. "PVFS2 is used in production to provide a high-performance parallel
I/O capability to our users for their data-intensive applications. Running
PVFS2 over InfiniBand further increases data throughput and lowers metadata
access latencies."
In partnership with Terrascale, Voltaire offers a second solution that
transforms the POSIX compliant standard Linux ext2 file system into a linearly
scalable high performance parallel file system with a unified namespace.
Performance tests conducted by Terrascale indicate that using Voltaire
interconnect solutions and TerraGrid software for direct storage I/O in a
cluster delivers 6X greater performance throughput than NFS over GbE.
Offering Customer Choice With Scalable Clustered NAS Solutions
For customers using NFS/CIFS in their networked storage environments, Voltaire
and TerraScale introduced today a solution for scalable clustered NAS. The new
solution converts "off-the-shelf" elements into linearly scalable and robust
NAS solutions that provide fast and efficient access to a unified namespace up
to sixteen petabytes in size. The InfiniBand Grid-based solution is more
flexible and cost-effective than monolithic proprietary NAS systems that are
often used for large-scale applications. The solution leverages iSCSI RDMA
over InfiniBand for high performance back-end storage connectivity.
"Storage has often been the bottleneck in large clusters, essentially limiting
the size of clusters that are practical. And while the vendor community has
done a decent job in solving the file I/O problem using proprietary
technologies, Voltaire is enabling the creation of massive clusters using
industry standard platforms and technologies, such as iSCSI RDMA and
InfiniBand, for both block and file I/O," said Arun Taneja, founder and
consulting analyst of The Taneja Group. "These solutions will put a lot of
pressure on proprietary products very quickly."
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