France's CEA wires up 6 PB of disks ahead of HPC upgrades

Seagate squeezes out DDN

France's Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission (CEA), is bulking up its high-performance computing (HPC) storage and I/O, and has anointed Seagate as the lucky vendor.

The rollout, in which Seagate elbowed out DataDirect Networks, started with six petabytes of hard drives attached to a ClusterStor L300, with 200GB per second I/O.

As The Register's HPC sister publication The Next Platform notes, the upgrade is part of a 2016 program that includes the planned retirement of the current Tera-100 system (which holds position 74 on the Top500 list).

Last November, the CEA took delivery of the first chunks of Tera-1000 (note the extra zero in the name), one Xeon-based system and one Knights Landing system. A Bull Exascale Interconnect is the next part of the rollout, and should be in place by midyear.

In the current storage upgrade, the CEA kept the Lustre filesystem that's been in place since the system was commissioned in 2010.

During this year, CEA department leader Jacques-Charles Lafoucriere told The Next Platform, the agency plans to add another Seagate Lustre appliance to add another 200GB per second throughput.

The next phase of Tera-1000, due in 2017, will consist of 30 Bull Sequana X1000 cells, with a specified performance in the order of 25 petaflops. The agency will also run up a pile of terabyte-per-second-plus Flash storage, with a vendor to be chosen by the middle of the year.

Lafoucriere says the CEA is working on its own I/O libraries ahead of its hardware upgrades, including I/O redirection software, with proxies talking to the file system.

More at The Next Platform, here. ®