Experiences with the First Flash-based Supercomputer

Experiences with the First Flash-based Supercomputer

Speaker: Michael L Norman, Director, San Diego Supercomputer Center
Locations:

University of Queensland: Time: 10.30 - 11.30am Seminar Room 505A/B, Axon Building (#47), St Lucia Campus. Enquiries: Fran Moore rcc-admin@uq.edu.au (Research Computing Centre)

Monash University: Time: 10.30 - 11.30am Room 207, Building 63, Clayton Campus. Enquiries: Caitlin Slattery (Faculty of IT)

Abstract:
The data-intensive Gordon supercomputer went into production in 2012 at SDSC. It was the first HPC system for open academic research to feature massive amounts of flash SSD (300 TB). This feature was intended to introduce a layer of fast storage in between RAM and disk storage, especially for random IO operations which are ill-served by parallel file systems. Three years on I can report that this design feature was a roaring success, although not entirely in the way we expected. In this talk I discuss the lessons learned from the Gordon experiment.

Biography:
Michael L. Norman is the Director of the San Diego Supercomputer Center and Distinguished Professor of Physics at UC San Diego where he also directs the Laboratory for Computational Astrophysics. He received his B.S. from Caltech in 1975, and his Ph. D. from UC Davis in 1980. After holding appointments at the Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos National Laboratories, the Max Planck Institute for Astrophysics, and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, he joined the faculty at UC San Diego in 2000. His research focus is the computer simulation of astronomical phenomena using supercomputers, and the development of the numerical methods to carry them out. He is the author of over 200 papers on diverse topics including star formation, cosmic jets, and cosmological evolution. His computer visualizations have appeared in numerous educational TV shows and films, including PBS Nova and The Discovery Channel. He is the recipient of the Alexander von Humboldt Research Prize and the IEEE Sidney Fernbach Award. He was elected Fellow of the American Physical Society in 2001, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2005.

Slides: Experiences with the First Flash-based Supercomputer (3.4 MB, PDF)