SC22: Versity Deploys 60PB System on Tapes for National Center for Supercomputing Applications

Versity Software, Inc. announced that the 60PB mass storage solution for NCSA at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, has been procured, tested, and deployed. This project is part of a long-term storage project called Granite.

The new storage system is driven by Versity’s next gen Scale Out Archive Manager (ScoutAM) platform. The system provides researchers with seamless access to archival data using open standard protocols and automates complex workflows while enabling responsive metadata searches and queries.

“This system allows NCSA to expand and modernize our essential data services for our broad research community, with a modern open-standard platform that can grow as our needs continue to evolve” said Christopher Heller, program manager, NCSA. “This creates a scalable foundation for more efficient data management in support of our scientific missions.”

The  ScoutAM platform is deployed in a scale-out architecture to enable petabyte scale production workflows between a 2-tier system comprised of Taiga and Granite.

Taiga is NCSA’s Global File System running Lustre that is integrated with all non-HIPAA environments in the National Petascale Computation Facility. The Granite long-term mass storage infrastructure is closely integrated with Taiga, to provide users with a place to store longer term archive datasets.

In Granite, ScoutAM runs on 5 Dell R730 nodes which manage a 2.6PB data cache and a large tape library.

Globally accessible cluster export nodes allow researcher access to the system directly via tools such as scp, Globus, and S3. All tape IO is parallelized across 34 tape drives with 60PB of data in the library, with headroom for more storage over time.

“Versity’s mission is to provide customers like NCSA with a world-class data management platform to seamlessly orchestrate extremely resource intensive high speed data movement across any range of storage types at very large scale” said Bruce Gilpin, CEO and co-founder of Versity.