Scality is the bomb, says Los Alamos

RING software helps keep US nukes safe

Scality's object storage is helping keep US nukes safe by providing back-end storage for Los Alamos Nuclear Lab's Trinity supercomputer.

The RING is Scality's object storage software with erasure coding, data resiliency, and enormous scale-out capability.

Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) recently invested in Scality and is including the RING in its offerings. Gartner's March 2016 Critical Capabilities for Object Storage report ranked Scality second, behind IBM Cleversafe and ahead of HDS's HCP, for the overall object storage use case.

Los Alamos Nuclear Labs (LANL) is a well-known supercomputer user and uses supercomputing in its simulation activities to investigate the functioning and safety of America's nuclear weapon stockpile. Its Trinity supercomputer will be powerful enough to work on what it describes as "finely resolved 3D calculations for mission-critical simulations." Sounds like a virtual reality nuclear bomb explosion without the headsets.

Trinity uses Cray Sonexion (OEM's Seagate ClusterStor arrays running Lustre) for its main processing work.

Trinity was also the name of the USA's nuclear bomb device exploded in New Mexico in July, 1945.

Gary Grider, High Performance Computing (HPC) Division Leader at Los Alamos, said: "Erasure-protected highly parallel object storage is a critical part of the future lab HPC storage architecture. This 'campaign storage' is where we are able to provide persistence and durability for simulation runs from Trinity. Each individual simulation run can generate single files of over one petabyte in size. Our Scality RING deployment has been able to write data at 28.5GB/sec – the fastest object storage we've ever fielded."

As canned quotes go, that's a pretty good one. And it implies there's some interestingly fast hardware being used.

LANL wants a file interface across its various storage pools and Scality is working with it on MarFS, an open source, scalable namespace technology. It will give end users a virtualised view of their storage environment, with a global namespace across POSIX and non-POSIX data repositories, including the Scality RING. MarsFS will provide a familiar look and feel for end users accessing the RING. ®