WekaIO to Accelerate Molecular Research at Stanford Linear Accelerator Center

WekaIO, Inc. announced that the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center (SLAC) National Accelerator Laboratory has deployed its Limitless Data Platform for performance, high throughput, and high-reliability storage that is optimized for flash.

Weka offers an easy to manage solution that provides high reliability for their Home Directory System and high performance for their Fast Feedback Buffer System. It speeds up time spent on managing their systems and can support multiple users, concurrently, on the storage resources to accelerate research jobs.

Operated by Stanford University for the US Department of Energy’s Office of Science, SLAC is a multiprogram laboratory with research spanning particle physics, astrophysics and cosmology, materials, chemistry, bio- and energy sciences, and scientific computing.

LCLS at SLAC is a Free Electron Laser (FEL) that takes X-ray snapshots of atoms and molecules at work, providing atomic resolution detail on fast timescales to reveal fundamental processes in materials, technology, and living things. The near-real-time interpretation of molecular structures revealed by X-ray diffraction requires computational intensities of unprecedented scales coupled with a data path of unprecedented bandwidth. Data analysis must be performed quickly to allow users to iterate their experiments and extract the most value from scarce beam time.

The Weka platform provides a distributed flash-optimized file system that could help overcome the challenging characteristics of the lab’s environment, which included:

• The ability to provide fast feedback for reduced time of completion for experiments and improved quality of data to increase research success
• 24/7 availability
• Short start-up times to accommodate bursts of short research jobs
• Concurrent R/W sequential throughput between the front-end electronics and the storage layers, and between storage and processing

The Limitless Data Platform, built on the Weka File System (WekaFS), will handle the high throughput and high concurrency required by the first layer in the LCLS data pipeline. WekaFS is a software-defined, POSIX, and distributed file system with multi-protocol access that delivers tdata center efficiencies by leveraging the compute technologies such as NVMe, fast networking, and GPU acceleration for data access.

“Parallelism is a hallmark of the Weka Limitless Data Platform and a key differentiator in our system’s ability to go above and beyond what other solutions in the marketplace provide,” said Ken Grohe, president and CRO, WekaIO. “When you are dealing with a resource like the LCLS, you need a file system that can provide concurrent access to storage resources so that experimenters can maximize their allotted time on the research instruments. Weka provides the performance, flexibility and extensibility needed to overcome the most data-intense environments to facilitate workloads with the least amount of cost and complexity.“