High-Performance Computing | News

Rutgers U Implements Scale-Out Storage System for HPC

• By Leila Meyer
• 07/31/13

Rutgers University will implement a scale-out storage solution to support its growing high-performance computing (HPC) needs.

Rutgers' new HPC cluster is an Intel-based system using Infiniband, and the university needed a cost-effective, high-performing storage solution to support it. The university chose the ClusterStor 1500 from data storage technology provider, Xyratex because it met the university's requirements and the company has significant experience implementing and supporting such systems, according to a prepared statement from Don Smith, CIO of Rutgers.

The ClusterStor 1500 is the newest member of Xyratex's ClusterStor family of scale-out HPC storage solutions, and according to the company, it provides "breakthrough industry performance and efficiency."

Key features of the ClusterStor 1500 include:

• Architecture that brings together server, network, and storage platforms into a single integrated, modular, scale-out storage building block, enabling the system to scale both performance and capacity while reducing administrative overhead;
• Reduced hardware complexity with increased reliability, availability, and serviceability;
• Ability to scale performance from 1.25 GBps to 110 GBps and raw capacity from 42 TB to 7.3 PB;
• The scalable, high-performance, open-source parallel Lustre file system; and
• ClusterStor Manager system management application that consolidates management of the entire storage cluster infrastructure, RAID data protection layer, operating system, and Lustre into a single-pane administrator interface.

"Departments at large organizations or medium-sized enterprises today need high-performing and scalable storage solutions that are easy to deploy and manage, cost-efficient, and reliable even under demanding workloads," said Ken Claffey, senior vice president and general manager of the ClusterStor business at Xyratex, in a prepared statement. "As companies of all sizes are increasingly utilizing complex simulation and modeling applications running on Linux-based compute clusters, traditional enterprise storage systems cannot meet the performance and scalability needs of these environments. We engineered and built the ClusterStor 1500 to bring the performance power of Lustre to this growing market."

Rutgers is a public research university located in New Jersey. It serves more than 45,000 undergraduate and 20,000 graduate students and employs more than 9,000 full- and part-time faculty members across its four campuses.