Help Desk: Hardware Update

Wide Area GPFS

—Patricia Kovatch

Scientists and researchers use geographically distributed compute, data and other scientific instruments and resources on the TeraGrid. Efficient use of these distributed resources is often hindered by the manual process of checking for available storage at various sites, copying files and then managing multiple copies of datasets. If a scientist's files and datasets were automatically available at each geographically distributed resource, the scientist's ability to perform research efficiently is increased. A scientist could schedule resources at different sites to process the globally available dataset more quickly.

With 64 dual processor IA-64 IBM eServers and 500 TB of IBM FastT100 storage,we created a General Parallel File System (GPFS) accessible over the dedicated 40 Gb/s backbone network (Wide Area Network (WAN)) of the TeraGrid. The WAN GPFS is mounted at the TeraGrid partner sites in addition to any local parallel file systems. To determine ownership of files between sites with different UID spaces, a user's Globus x.509 certificate identity is used.

Several applications including the Bioinformatics Research Network (BIRN), the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC), the National Virtual Observatory (NVO) and ENZO, the cosmological simulation code use WAN GPFS as part of a pilot project.

Patricia Kovatch is reachable via email at pkovatch@sdsc.edu