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Terascala Streamlines File System Management at Virginia Tech

Simplifying Lustre file system management

Terascala, Inc., in HPC storage management software, announced that a storage appliance managed by Terascala is simplifying Lustre file system management at Virginia Tech’s Advanced Research Computing (ARC) facility.

Advanced Research Computing 

Available to the Virginia Tech research community, ARC’s mission is to advance computational science, engineering, and technology.

Terascala’s TeraOS HPC storage management software has been a part of the university’s cluster, BlueRidge, since June of this year. BlueRidge is a 408-node Cray CS-300 cluster with 6,528 cores and 27.3TB of memory. With a theoretical peak performance of approximately 1 teraflop/s, it allows researchers to run parallel simulations and focus on computationally-intensive problems.

Terascala’s TeraOS provides a truly complete Lustre parallel file system solution,” explained Brian Marshall, computational scientist, Virginia Tech. “The hardware installation and setup were straightforward. The web dashboard provides real-time monitoring and management capabilities, easing the burden of administration.

According to Marshall, the performance storage appliance is an integral part of the BlueRidge cluster: “ARC uses Lustre as the parallel scratch filesystem for BlueRidge. Many distributed applications require a large, shared space to write temporary and checkpoint results. Without a high performance, parallel filesystem, file I/O to a single disk would create a crippling bottleneck, resulting in most processors idling. Terascala’s Lustre solution removes this bottleneck, allowing applications to take full advantage of the computational power available.

The Terascala-managed HPC storage appliance allows Marshall and his team to focus on algorithms and other computational tasks instead of trouble-shooting file systems.

The system is a turnkey appliance that definitely simplifies file system administration,” continued Marshall. “It allows us to spend our time elsewhere-which is extremely valuable.

In regards to taking advantage of all of the capabilities of their system, Marshall believes that Virginia Tech is just scratching the surface: “We are still in the process of optimizing our applications for the new file system and are seeing promising, initial results.

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