A research team from the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at University of California, San Diego, and the University of California's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory won the Storage Challenge competition at SC09, the international conference on high-performance computing, networking, storage, and analysis, which was held last week in Portland, Oregon.
The research team based its Storage Challenge submission for the annual conference on the architecture of SDSC's recently announced Dash high-performance compute system, a super-sized version of flash memory-based devices such as laptops, digital cameras and thumb drives that also employs vSMP Foundation software from ScaleMP, Inc. to provide virtual symmetric multiprocessing capabilities.
The Storage Challenge is a competition showcasing applications and environments that effectively use the storage subsystem in high-performance computing, which is often the limiting system component. Submissions were based upon tried and true production systems as well as research or proof-of-concept projects not yet in production. Judging was based on present measurements of performance, scalability, and storage subsystem utilization as well as innovation and effectiveness.
Dash is the prototype for a much larger flash-memory HPC system called Gordon, which is scheduled to go online in mid-2011( SDSC was awarded a five-year, $20 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) this summer to build and operate the powerful system). Both Dash and Gordon are designed to accelerate investigation of a wide range of data-intensive science problems by providing cost-effective data performance more than 10 times faster than most other HPC systems in use today.
The hypothesis of the team's Challenge, called "Data Intensive Science: Solving Scientific Unknowns by Solving Storage Problems," was that solid state drives (SSDs) based on NAND (Not AND) flash technology are "ready for prime time" in that that they are reliable and cheap enough to improve input/output density (I/O rate) by more than 10 times, or greater than one order of magnitude.
"The current data storage I/O rate is far lower than the ever-increasing rate of enthusiasm among researchers and scientists, who are now drowning in a sea of data because of this differential," said SDSC's Arun Jagatheesan, team leader for this year's competition. "With the SC09 Storage Challenge, our team demonstrated the prototype of a data-intensive supercomputer that can bridge this gap. Our mission in this challenge was to design, build, deploy and commission a prototype of such a supercomputer at challenging construction and operational costs, without compromising the data-intensive performance of the scientific applications."
"A major challenge for the scientific user community is to deal with storage latency issues in our systems," said SDSC Interim Director Mike Norman, who is also the principal investigator for the center's upcoming Gordon supercomputer. "Even though not all scientific problems are data-intensive, many of them are, and this challenge illustrated that we can overcome latency issues with innovative approaches and partnerships. We're looking forward to helping the NSF and others meet the needs of this new generation of data-intensive science."
"Moving a physical disk-head to accomplish random I/O is so last-century," said Allan Snavely, associate director of SDSC, co-principal investigator for SDSC's Gordon system and project leader for Dash. "Indeed, Charles Babbage designed a computer based on moving mechanical parts almost two centuries ago. With respect to I/O, it's time to stop trying to move protons and just move electrons. With the aid of flash SSDs, we can do latency-bound file reads more than 10 times faster and more efficiently than anything being done today."
In addition to Jagatheesan and Norman, SDSC team members included Jiahua He, Allan Snavely, Maya Sedova, Sandeep Gupta, Mahidhar Tatineni, Jeffrey Bennett, Eva Hocks, Larry Diegel and Thomas Hutton from SDSC; Steven Swanson (UC San Diego); Peter Nugent and Janet Jacobsen (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); and Lonnie Heidtke, of Instrumental Inc., a Bloomington, Minn.-based provider of professional services focused on advanced and high-performance computing.
Source: DDJ.com
Saturday, November 28, 2009
Friday, November 27, 2009
New ToughDisk 3500 SATA Rugged Hard Disk Released
Today, organizations are looking for data storage facilities in extreme environments such as manned or unmanned aircraft, naval vessels and ground vehicles, according to company officials. These organizations will need features such as speed of data transfer, storage capacity, and tolerance for harsh conditions and manhandling in their data storage devices.
The demand for high capacity storage disks are constantly on the rise and there seems to no end to the desires of customers when it to comes to storage spaces. Looking to cater to this huge demand from customers and companies alike, EMS Technologies has launched ToughDisk 3500 SATA Rugged Hard Disk.
According to EMS Technologies officials, the company has increased the storage capacity of the new TD3500 SATA hard disk by more than 50 percent from 640 GB to 1 TB. Company officials claim that the product offers improved performance under the vibration conditions compared with the previous product.
“Our newest version of the TD3500 SATA hard disk was developed to meet the growing demands for rugged data storage required by new applications in in-flight Internet connectivity, in-flight video on demand, and military surveillance applications,” said Kin Seto, vice president of business development and marketing for EMSFormation. “We are providing more value to our customers by improving performance and storage capabilities without an increase in price.”
The TD3500 SATA hard disk is meant for rough usage and performs optimally in temperature, altitude, shock, vibration, humidity, and dust conditions. It can be used as a drop-in, commercial off-the-shelf, replacement of conventional 3.5” low-profile drives as it contains industry standard 3.5” form factor and Serial ATA interface. It can be used with high-endSAS controllers as well as with any of the ubiquitous embedded SATA ports.
---------------------------
Source: TMCnet.com
The demand for high capacity storage disks are constantly on the rise and there seems to no end to the desires of customers when it to comes to storage spaces. Looking to cater to this huge demand from customers and companies alike, EMS Technologies has launched ToughDisk 3500 SATA Rugged Hard Disk.
According to EMS Technologies officials, the company has increased the storage capacity of the new TD3500 SATA hard disk by more than 50 percent from 640 GB to 1 TB. Company officials claim that the product offers improved performance under the vibration conditions compared with the previous product.
“Our newest version of the TD3500 SATA hard disk was developed to meet the growing demands for rugged data storage required by new applications in in-flight Internet connectivity, in-flight video on demand, and military surveillance applications,” said Kin Seto, vice president of business development and marketing for EMSFormation. “We are providing more value to our customers by improving performance and storage capabilities without an increase in price.”
The TD3500 SATA hard disk is meant for rough usage and performs optimally in temperature, altitude, shock, vibration, humidity, and dust conditions. It can be used as a drop-in, commercial off-the-shelf, replacement of conventional 3.5” low-profile drives as it contains industry standard 3.5” form factor and Serial ATA interface. It can be used with high-endSAS controllers as well as with any of the ubiquitous embedded SATA ports.
---------------------------
Source: TMCnet.com
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Drobo offers new data storage device
Data Robotics, which has won plaudits for its Drobo storage device, is introducing a new model for both professionals and consumers.
Dubbed the Drobo S, the new gadget differs from its predecessor by adding a fifth hard-drive slot and an eSATA port. Thanks to the new port and new components, the Drobo S can transfer data up to 50 percent faster than the original Drobo. And where the original device will maintain a copy of your data even if one drive fails, the new model can sustain a failure of up to two drives.
Consumers will have to pay up for the new features. The base price for the Drobo S is $800, without any hard drives included. In contrast, the original Drobo has a base price of $400. The new model goes on sale today through B&H, Amazon.com and Data Robotics' own Web site.
Troy Wolverton writes about Drobo's new data storage. In his article at mercurynews.com, he commented: One big difference between the two gadgets is that the Drobo S needs to be connected directly to a PC. Data Robotics sells an attachment that allows the original Drobo to be connected to a router and act as a network-attached storage device. But that attachment won't work with the Drobo S.
As with the original Drobo, which Data Robotics will continue to sell, the Drobo S incorporates the company's BeyondRAID technology. RAID is a system designed for multiple disc devices that helps coordinate the workings of the discs so that they provide one large area of storage space. Sometimes RAID systems are configured so that data can be read and transferred from them as quickly as possible. Other times, they are configured so that they provide a backup in case of disc failure.
The BeyondRAID technology aims to improve on RAID by making it faster, easier and more reliable. For instance, unlike typical RAID devices, Drobo's allows users to mix and match discs of varying storage size.
-------------------
A technology to watch for. The thought of using heterogeneous disks provides longer ROI for the ever-changing models and sizes of disks.
JonQBX
Dubbed the Drobo S, the new gadget differs from its predecessor by adding a fifth hard-drive slot and an eSATA port. Thanks to the new port and new components, the Drobo S can transfer data up to 50 percent faster than the original Drobo. And where the original device will maintain a copy of your data even if one drive fails, the new model can sustain a failure of up to two drives.
Consumers will have to pay up for the new features. The base price for the Drobo S is $800, without any hard drives included. In contrast, the original Drobo has a base price of $400. The new model goes on sale today through B&H, Amazon.com and Data Robotics' own Web site.
Troy Wolverton writes about Drobo's new data storage. In his article at mercurynews.com, he commented: One big difference between the two gadgets is that the Drobo S needs to be connected directly to a PC. Data Robotics sells an attachment that allows the original Drobo to be connected to a router and act as a network-attached storage device. But that attachment won't work with the Drobo S.
As with the original Drobo, which Data Robotics will continue to sell, the Drobo S incorporates the company's BeyondRAID technology. RAID is a system designed for multiple disc devices that helps coordinate the workings of the discs so that they provide one large area of storage space. Sometimes RAID systems are configured so that data can be read and transferred from them as quickly as possible. Other times, they are configured so that they provide a backup in case of disc failure.
The BeyondRAID technology aims to improve on RAID by making it faster, easier and more reliable. For instance, unlike typical RAID devices, Drobo's allows users to mix and match discs of varying storage size.
-------------------
A technology to watch for. The thought of using heterogeneous disks provides longer ROI for the ever-changing models and sizes of disks.
JonQBX
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
