The Importance of Fast, Scalable Storage for Today’s HPC

Intel Confidential — Do Not Forward

The Importance of Fast, Scalable Storage for Today’s HPCBill Webster

High Performance Data Division, Intel Corporation

Some Data About Data….

2.5 >80% ~90%

Quadrillion bytes of data created daily1

Of data today’s data is unstructured

Of the world’s data has been created within the last 2

years…

1 Source: IBM

The Case for Fast, Scalable Storage

Solving important problems drives technology investments

Fast storage is critical for maximum application performance

Lustre software was created for performance at large scale

Storage fueled by Lustre* is stable, flexible and highly efficient

Lustre is the most widely used parallel storage for HPC1

Over 60% of the fastest 100 HPC sites worldwide rely on Lustre2

1 Source: IDC research

2 Intel analysis of www.top500.org rankings, December 2013

* Some names and brands may be claimed as the property of others.

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• Workloads are diverse and dynamic, and applications are compute or data-intensive – often both

• The value of HPC storage is measured by speed, scale & IOPS

• To meet these requirements, HPC storage needs to:

• Scale-out for increased I/O and capacity

• Perform I/O in parallel for maximum throughput

• Support virtually unlimited number of clients

• Commercial “HPC” needs the same level of performance

Lustre was architected for speed, scale and IOPS

HPC Places Unique Demands on Storage


HPC Storage SoftwareIntroducing the Lustre file system

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What is Lustre*?

Open source, distributed, parallel, clustered file system

Designed for maximum performance at massive scale

POSIX compliant – key for supporting applications

Global, shared name space – all clients can access all data

Very resource efficient and cost effective


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What Makes Lustre* So Important?

Purpose-built for speed and scale: Speed: Unmatched performance

Openness: choice of storage platforms

Efficiency: Achieves +90% utilization of storage resources

Affordable: Low CAPEX and OPEX

Scale-out: Independently scale storage capacity and bandwidth

Stable and reliable: Backed by Intel, the worldwide leader in Lustre support


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Good Fit Applications for Lustre*…

Financial analysis – Modeling risk exposure & portfolio valuation

Geosciences - weather forecasting and climate modeling

Bioinformatics – genomics, proteomics, drug discovery

Energy - exploration, reservoir modeling, wind energy

Engineering - CAE, CFD and FEA for aerospace, automotive

SCIENCEANALYTICS ENGINEERING


What Does a Lustre* Solution Look Like?

ManagementNetwork

High Performance Data Network(InfiniBand, 10GbE)

MetadataServers

Object StorageServers

Intel Manager for Lustre* (requires Enterprise Edition)


Object StorageTargets (OSTs)


MetadataTarget (MDT)

ManagementTarget (MGT)

Lustre Clients – diskless compute servers


Management Servers

ManagementNetwork


MetadataServers









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Storage Servers

ManagementNetwork


MetadataServers









2


Compute clients

ManagementNetwork


MetadataServers









3


Interconnect fabric

ManagementNetwork


MetadataServers









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The Results? Fast, scalable storage & I/O

ManagementNetwork









• Over +2 TB/s achieved

• 500-750 GB/s production

• +80,000 IO/s



Intel® Lustre SolutionsEnterprise Edition for Lustre* software


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Intel® Enterprise Edition for Lustre* Intel®

Manager for Lustre is the heart of all Intel EE for Lustre based solutions.


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Intel® Manager for Lustre*

The ‘dashboard’ canvas displays a variety of charts that illustrates performance levels and resource utilization.

Visual system status indictor

Configure, create and optimize Lustre file systems

Intelligent, intuitive logging – understand how your storage is performing quickly and easily



A word about Big Data.

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The Convergence of HPC and Big Data• Big Data problems are getting larger

• More compute power. More files. More capacity and data throughput

• MapReduce workloads are being added to HPC environments

• 1 in 3 HPC sites have deployed Hadoop1

• But MapReduce workloads run differently than typical HPC applications

• Compute nodes are diskless – no local storage

• By default, Hadoop expects local storage within each node

• Lustre storage accelerates the value of Hadoop • Improves application performance

• Boosts storage efficiency and lowers management complexity


1 Source: IDC research

Intel® Enterprise Edition

for Lustre* software Includes theHadoop ‘adapter’ for Lustre

• Replacement for HDFS• Shared, parallel

storage optimizes performance• Lowers

management complexity• Maximizes

utilization of storage resources


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Case Study: Sanger Wellcome Trust

Challenge: Improved processes and lab equipment led to exponential increases in the volume of data being generated – but storage budgets were growing slowly.

Large data sets are difficult to proactively manage, and can easily overwhelm storage resources. Un-optimized storage had a direct, negative impact on application performance – slowing the time for breakthrough results.

Solution: Exploit the power and scale of HPC-class storage, powered by Lustre* software and supported by Intel.

Benefits provided: Openness – Broad array of storage vendors and

products Global namespace – all clients can access all data Performance – Upwards of 1 TB/s Capacity - Virtually unlimited file system and per

file sizes Confidence – Backed by Intel expertise with Lustre

• 10-15 TB of processed data weekly

• Processed data is small fraction of overall storage capacity

• Stored in iRODS data warehouse

• BAM or FASTA format files• Use pattern matching

algorithms like BWA and BLAST

• Lustre offers immense scalable capacity

• Now have 8 production Lustre file systems – and are planning to add more

• Performance was main goal – but scale, flexibility, efficiency were critical


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Thank You.


Technology

The Importance of Fast, Scalable Storage for Today’s HPC