HPCS Storage Lead John White will be giving at talk at the annual Lustre Users Group 2016 conference being held in Portland, Oregon this week.
John's presentation will provide an introduction to the experiences and challenges involved in providing parallel storage to a HPC focused condo-style infrastructure. High Performance Computing Services at Lawrence Berkeley Lab serves as a middle-ground at the institutional level, between grad-student managed computation and the national-allocation class computing such as those offered by NERSC and XSEDE. Given our revenue sources, our infrastructure style is characterized by frequent small-scale buy-ins as well as infrequent 'large' grant funding. That challenge has shaped a nimble infrastructure that maximizes our customers' dollar/GB and dollar/FLOP but has lead to unique requirements from Lustre including upgrade paths that break traditional parallel file system rules. We focus on ease of management and, above all, a deep desire for uniformity across numerous Lustre instances to reach the goal of a true building-block infrastructure.
