LSI Teams With Start-Up Whamcloud

LSI Corporation announced a collaboration with Whamcloud Inc. aimed at advancing Lustre parallel file system performance for data-intensive scientific research. LSI and Whamcloud are working together to conduct Lustre performance testing on the LSI Engenio 2600 storage array using the Hyperion testbed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL).

The alliance brings together LSI, which has deployed more than 200 petabytes of storage in HPC environments, with Whamcloud, a venture-backed company of HPC storage and Lustre industry veterans, focused on evolving Lustre and advancing HPC storage. 

"A major technical challenge confronting the HPC community is how to meet our storage performance requirements and manage the enormous volumes of data generated by the ever more powerful supercomputer systems," said Matt Leininger, who leads the Hyperion project at LLNL. "Only by working with industry leaders, such as LSI and Whamcloud, can we meet these challenges and advance the next-generations of HPC storage and parallel file systems."

Utilizing the Hyperion large-scale testbed, LSI and Whamcloud are testing an Engenio 2600 system capable of achieving 4GB/s sustained throughput. The system consists of two LSI 6Gb/s SAS-based controllers, one Engenio DE5600 SAS drive enclosure and 24 2.5-inch SAS drives in a 2U rack space.

The company also introduced a new family of StorageStak solutions, which provide LSI storage system customers with reference configurations designed to address specific HPC requirements and challenges. One of the first solution configurations in the StorageStak family is the FastStak solution. Users can configure up to twenty Engenio 2600 systems in a standard 40U Electronics Industry Alliance (EIA) rack to deploy a FastStak solution that delivers 80GB/s sustained throughput.

"Through our collaboration with Whamcloud, LSI is working with the industry’s foremost Lustre experts to test the Engenio 2600 system at one of the world’s most demanding Lustre sites," said Julie Ryan, director of alliances, Engenio Storage Group, LSI. "Lustre parallel file systems are deployed by a large number of today’s HPC customers, and as a result of our efforts with Whamcloud, these organizations can be confident that our Engenio 2600 storage system delivers the price-performance and flexibility to meet a wide range of Lustre workloads."
 
"Whamcloud has made a commitment to the HPC community to evolve Lustre technology, and a key aspect of this mission is the alignment and advancement of data storage solutions," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "Extending Lustre onto forthcoming petaflop systems requires maximized bandwidth rates between storage devices and clusters, which is why we are working with industry leaders such as LSI that have the experience and technology to achieve this."

The collaboration with Whamcloud reinforces the commitment of LSI to optimize its storage solutions for Lustre HPC environments. LSI was one of ten computing industry leaders to create the large-scale Hyperion testbed in 2008, with the goal of accelerating the development of powerful next-generation Linux clusters. LSI also contributed the first storage system installed on the cluster, an LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage system.