NASA Ames Inks Lustre Support Deal

Whamcloud,
Inc. announced a Lustre support contract with the NASA Advanced Supercomputing
(NAS) Division at NASA’s Ames
Research Center.

Lustre, the massively parallel open source file system, is
used extensively within NAS. NASA Ames has over $3.0 billion in capital
equipment, 2,300 research personnel and a $600 million annual budget and plays
a critical role in virtually all NASA missions in support of America’s space
and aeronautics programs. The contract is for up to five years of Lustre
support.

"File systems and
supercomputers are evolving separately, and integrating multiple generations of
hardware and software is a requirement for the NAS facility. We have moved to a
data-centric model where the file system is a standalone component that
persists between generations of supercomputers. Lustre is the key element to
make this work," said Bob Ciotti, supercomputing systems group lead
and lead system architect for the NAS Division. "Our plan with this effort will allow for better operational continuity
as we continue to evolve our super-scale computational environments."

"Being chosen by
NASA to support their Lustre operations is an extreme honor. NASA is a world
leader in a wide range of research areas involving heavy computation. Fast and
reliable data movement and storage is required to make use of the large
computers," said Brent Gorda, CEO of Whamcloud. "NASA depends on computational results for
scientific discovery, design and mission operation. We’re excited to be a part
of supporting their research and the smooth operation of the data path."

Pleiades,
NASA’s largest system, ranks 7th on the TOP500 list of the world’s most
powerful supercomputers and has Lustre file systems that provide nearly 10 PB
of storage and serve over 110 thousand cores. In a data-centric model where
compute is attached to storage, Lustre provides shared data access between all
major systems at the center including the hyperwall-2 visualization system and
the Columbia
supercomputer. Scientists are running large-scale jobs on these systems to gain
insight into Earth’s ocean and climate variability; reduce harmful emissions
from aircraft; and design future vehicles for planetary and space exploration.
The systems were also critical to supporting debris damage assessment on space
shuttle missions and gave managers data about critical decisions to perform
repairs and clear the orbiter for safe landing.