LSI Joins HPC Hyperion Project at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

LSI Corporation has teamed with nine computing industry leaders at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to accelerate the development of powerful next-generation Linux clusters.

In this effort, called the Hyperion Project, LSI joins other leading technology providers Cisco, Dell, DDN, Intel, Mellanox, QLogic, RedHat, Sun and Supermicro to create a large-scale testbed for high-performance computing (HPC) technologies critical to the stockpile stewardship missions of the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). In addition, the participants intend to make petaFLOP/s (quadrillion floating operation per second) computing systems more affordable for governmental and commercial research organizations.

"The Hyperion Project provides LSI with a unique opportunity to develop and test hardware and software technologies on an unprecedented scale," said Dave Ellis, director, HPC architecture, LSI. "Our participation in the project enables us to provide innovative, next-generation storage solutions to our high-performance computing customers and OEMs in substantially less time."

The first half of Hyperion is now online. LSI contributed the first storage system installed on the Hyperion cluster, an Engenio 7900 HPC storage system with initial capacity of over 384 terabytes of data and utilizing a 20 Gb/s InfiniBand host interface.

"LSI will help push the bandwidth to disk from clusters such as Hyperion," said Mark Seager, head of advanced computing technology at LLNL. "Hyperion serves as a testbed upon which this capability will be proven out such that other cluster users can be confident in the greatly increased capability."

NNSA’s Advanced Simulation and Computing (ASC) program uses some of the world’s most powerful computers to simulate nuclear weapons performance and related scientific phenomena. High-resolution 3D simulations are a cornerstone of stockpile stewardship – the effort to ensure the safety, security and reliability of the nation’s nuclear deterrent without nuclear testing.

Designed for compute-intensive applications and high-bandwidth workloads, the 7900 HPC storage system combines leading-edge performance with enterprise-class availability and reliability features for applications requiring continuous high-speed data accessibility. Based on LSI seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, the 7900 HPC storage system benefits from more than thirty years of LSI design and development expertise. LSI has deployed more than 60 petabytes of data in HPC environments and shipped nearly 400,000 storage systems across a wide range of workloads and market segments.