HPC News: Brocade and Hyve Team on Big Data

Here’s a roundup of some of this week’s headlines from the high performance computing (HPC) sector:

Cray expands storage product line. Cray announced the latest addition to its line of scale-out Lustre storage solutions with the launch of the Cray Sonexion 1600 system. Built with a modular architecture, the new Sonexion 1600 is geared for HPC systems and is a key part of the Blue Waters supercomputer at NCSA at the University of Illinois. The system consists of more than 25 petabytes of usable storage in 36 cabinets with more than 17,000 disks, and delivers more than 1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth performance to more than 25,000 compute nodes. The Cray Sonexion 1600 system is also available and in production for non-Cray cluster-attached systems.

"Storage has become essential to scientific computing, and what Cray has done is design and build a storage system that is immense -- I don't know of any other system with the requirements for scalability that is being put together for such huge applications," said Bill Kramer, deputy project director for the Blue Waters Project at NCSA. "With the Sonexion 1600 storage system and its Cray Lustre environment, Cray has built a file system that is highly reliable, productive and very performant. NCSA also has recently demonstrated over 1.1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth with this file system for multiple real-world use cases, and we believe this to be the fastest Lustre file system ever built."

Brocade and Hyve partner for Big Data solution.  Brocade (BRCD) and Hyve Solutions, a division of SYNNEX Corporation (SNX) announced a definitive agreement to build a family of fully integrated, pre-tested data center solutions to deliver "unmatched" scale and performance for the Big Data market, the companies said. A Brocade VDX(R) 8770 Switch with VCS Fabric technology is combined with Hyve Solutions server and storage offerings, for a custom, turnkey, fully integrated, network, server and storage solution specifically designed for Big Data environments. "This agreement with Hyve Solutions is a significant milestone for Brocade," said Jason Nolet, Vice President, Data Center Networking Group, Brocade. "Working hand-in-hand with Hyve Solutions, an industry leader in purpose-built data center server and storage solutions, Brocade can help deliver best-in-class Big Data solutions built on Brocade VCS fabrics and backed by a robust network of hardware and software partners."

Bull supercomputer selected by SARA. French supercomputer maker Bull and Netherlands-based SARA announced that SARA has signed an agreement for the delivery of the new national supercomputer by Bull. The new system, which will be operational in the first half of 2013, replaces the current IBM system Huygens at SARA. Bull was selected after SARA investigated the demands and needs of the end users. The main criteria for the selection of the new system were a performance benchmark with key user applications, efficient energy utilization and cooling, a user-friendly environment and opportunities for flexible, on-demand growth. "We are very enthusiastic about the new system and our collaboration with Bull," said Dr. Ir. Anwar Osseyran, Director at SARA. "Our on-demand strategy allows us to offer cost-effective capacity tailored to the needs of the Dutch researchers. With the new generation Intel Xeon chips, combined with the latest hot water cooling technology of Bull, we not only have one of the most powerful, but also one of the greenest computer systems in the Netherlands. The system is a new impulse for the Dutch knowledge economy. Together with Bull as technology and business partner, we work on strengthening the competitive position of the Netherlands in science as well as in business."