UK Science and Technology Facilities Council Implements Quobyte

Quobyte Inc. announced that the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council‘s (STFC) Scientific Computing Department has selected its Data Center File System to manage the JASMIN Phase 4 with an initial managed capacity of 42PB.

Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1PB-3PB of data every day, and is expected to expand to 300PB by 2022.

JASMIN, which is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and delivered by STFC, provides the UK and European climate and earth-system science communities with a globally unique data intensive analysis and computational e-infrastructure.

It enables scientists to bring their processing to the data because many datasets, particularly model data which can range up to a petabyte, are too big to be easily shipped around or downloaded to their own computers for analysis. The JASMIN facility is a ‘super-data-cluster’ which delivers an e-infrastructure for data analysis. The e-infrastructure provides compute processing and scale-out storage linked together by a high bandwidth network in a supercomputing topology that provides short-term project storage, batch computing, hosted and cloud computing services to the European academic and scientific research community, reducing the time it takes to test new ideas and get results; from months or weeks to days or hours.

Quobyte’s Data Center File System gives the JASMIN facility the ability to unify their file, block, and object storage data sets in a centralized environment consisting of 11,500 cores on 600 nodes. In addition to having S3 connectivity, the system also afforded administrators the ability to scale their storage capacity and performance linearly with complete hardware independence while providing ease-of-management with little staff due to the software’s ability to self-monitor, maintain, and heal. The software’s dashboard allows an administrator to monitor thousands of physical machines in real-time, identifying load or tracking down issues.

“We’re very pleased that our Data Center File System has been chosen by STFC to manage the JASMIN Phase 4 e-infrastructure upgrade,” said Felix Hupfeld, Quobyte co-founder and CTO. “The need to develop ever larger complex models and simulations and to manipulate ever larger sets of data brings in its wake demands for access to HPC and collaboration amongst individual groups on a global scale. Our file system solution provides the necessary foundation for JASMIN to enable STFC to provide an upgraded data science service and on-demand cloud computing capacity and flexibility to its 1,700 registered users, supporting over 160 science projects currently.”