DDN: Professional Support for Lustre Clients on ARM-Based Platforms

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that its Whamcloud division, the foremost Lustre support provider and driving force behind Lustre innovation, is delivering professional support for Lustre clients on ARM Ltd.‘s architectures.

With this support offering, organizations can confidently use Lustre in production environments, introduce new clients into existing Lustre infrastructures, and deploy ARM-based clusters of any size within test, development or production environments.

As the use of Lustre continues to expand across HPC, AI and data-intensive, performance-driven applications, the deployment of alternative architectures is on the rise.

“With DDN’s Whamcloud division now fully supporting the Lustre client on ARM-based systems, users have more choice and can now introduce Arm into their mission-critical Lustre infrastructures with confidence,” said Robert Triendl, SVP, global sales, marketing, and field services, DDN. “Whamcloud’s support is timely and aligns with market demand as customers seek an expanded range of alternative architectures such as ARM-based hardware.“

ARM’s advanced, energy-efficient processor designs are enabling the intelligence in more than 130 billion silicon chips and securely powering products from the edge to the hyperscale. ARM’s expanding momentum in the HPC market is evidenced with recent announcements of deployments on Marvell Technology Group Ltd. ‘ ThunderX2 64-bit ARMv8-A processor by research and scientific customers, such as Sandia National Laboratories with the Astra Supercomputer.

“The adoption of Arm-based systems in HPC is accelerating to support users at all stages of their application development and providing more options for the diverse range of organizations deploying HPC systems,” said Brent Gorda, senior director, HPC, infrastructure line business, ARM. “Whamcloud’s support for Lustre on Arm is a key enabler for broader adoption of ARM in HPC and delivers more architecture options for the HPC community.“

“Sandia has deployed Lustre-based parallel file systems for many years to support its high-performance computing enterprise needs. Astra, the world’s fastest ARM-based platform, will use a flash-based Lustre file system that we expect will maximize the end-to-end efficiency of our mission workload,” said James Laros, lead, Vanguard-Astra program, Sandia National Laboratories.

Long recognized as a staple technology for those with the most demanding data requirements, Lustre is deployed in thousands of data centers in healthcare, energy, manufacturing, financial services, academia, research and HPC labs, and consistently is selected by top 100 HPC sites as the file system of choice for the world’s fastest computers.

“Lustre is critical to scalable, high performance system solutions, and deployments continue to expand across the globe,” said Mike Vildibill, VP, advanced technologies group, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Development LP. “Collaborating with Whamcloud enables us to advance Lustre adoption for all of our customers, spanning a diversity of system platforms.“

“The software ecosystem for ARM based servers continues to gain momentum, and Whamcloud’s commitment to enablement, optimization and support of the Lustre file system adds another key component for our partners and customers,” said Larry Wikelius, VP, ecosystem and partner enabling, Marvell Semiconductor, Inc. “Marvell’s ThunderX2 processor delivers the compute and memory performance that addresses the demands for Lustre performance at scale in the most advanced HPC environments.“