The new equipment is 10 times more efficient in terms of consumption energy.

Facilitate the access of users to their simulations, reduce waiting times and enable older calculations.
 

O Centro de Supercomputación de Galicia, CESGA, has just reorganized the disk storage system. The new  EMC VNX 5500 cabinets come to modernize the service provided Finisterrae, the Galician Virtual Supercomputer (SVG) and other IT equipment that exceeded center of technological obsolescence date. After a design period of the final configuration and testing, the team went into production in mid-October and is currently operating at full capacity. CESGA consolidates its storage equipment, reducing redundant components and getting a significant energy savings allows them to provide better service with less cost.
 

The acquisition of new equipment was done by public tender to be submitted 10 companies which technology and support criteria were assessed and the characteristics of energy saving and efficiency of each system. The cabinet was selected offered by Bull Spain SA belongs to the VNX storage array, which was introduced in the market earlier this year and is leading the SPECsfs2008 benchmarks for NFS operations performance that allows unified modular architecture, optimized to exploit the benefits of new solid state drives (SSD).

The change offers significant benefits to users of CESGA, they can access more storage capacity, more reliable and higher performance, which will allow them accelerate computations significantly. Also, it is a great advantages for the center, such as energy saving ten times lower with the new equipment, easier and more efficient management environment by providing a single, centralized storage for all and ensuring CESGA maintenance 24/7 over the next 6 years with a consequent saving in this type of costs.
 

The new system needed to maintain the level of service tailored to users CESGA was funded by the European Development Fund (ERDF) through the Sub-Projects scientific-technological equipment of the Directorate General for Research and Management National Plan I + D + i of the Ministry of Science and Innovation, and by the Xunta de Galicia and CSIC.
 

Other advantages for users

Besides the already mentioned advantages for users, greater storage capacity allows then to save simulation results through the file system "store", providing additionally improved response times, since even when multiple users by intensive storage system (downloading data, for example) others can quick access to the files as well.

Among the new features, separation of data between users ensures less interference between them, as well as increased availability and access time, improving service quality. So in case of accidental deletion of a file by the user himself can restore access without tape backup system. Finally, it is possible significant reduction in job interruptions caused by stops with SFS (Scalable File Share), as the architecture of the new system requires very little storage maintenance operations involving the same stop (99.999% availability).

Data safe and accessible

A supercomputer system consists of high performance computing nodes paired interconnected by a network of high speed, low latency, which accesses data from a storage subsystem. One of the keys to a live balanced in precise HPC is properly sizing a storage architecture that applications provide sufficient capacity to process the data.

The storage architecture is becoming more important in HPC performance because the data requirements increase dramatically in a short time. It is essential for scientific progress of the research data are stored in safe and accessible to researchers. The importance of the storage systems for high performance computing lies not only in the technical specifications required for the proper functioning of the bandwidth of the total system memory, total sustained floating point operations per second, FLOPs, ability to process data, but also in the nature of the data stored for use.
 

Daily MeteoGalicia institutions such as State Ports or Galega Medical Foundation Xenómica rely on weather data and genetics stored in the systems at CESGA. The data is essential to the daily calculations and simulations of, for example, weather forecasting, simulation of tides and currents and ultra-sequence of complete genomes.

Features of the new equipment configuration

The VNX storage array, which was presented to the market in early 2011, is a leader in benchmarks operations performance SPECsfs2008 NFS (Network File System or Sistems of Network Files) modular architecture allows unified, optimized to exploit the benefits new solid state drives (SSD).

Its integrated configuration CESGA systems is as follows:

- 3 redundant data servers each with settings:

- 2 Intel 5600 quad-core with 12GB of memory

- 3 1GbE network interfaces and 2 10GbE network interfaces

- 4 8Gbps FC ports

- 2 controllers with 12GB of cache each

- 3 SSD (Enterprise Flash) 100GB each for additional cache

- 59 600GB SAS disks and high performance 15K rpm

- 60-NL SAS drives 2TB and 7.2 k rpm

- Support for replication and file compression, which enables to optimize the use Disk Space

- Reduced Power Consumption less than 3KW

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