Ohio HPC Center Expands IBM HPC Storage With IBM

The Ohio HPC Center (OSC) is working with IBM Corporation to expand the center’s HPC storage capacity by 8.6PB.

“As science, technology and engineering advance, the need for larger and more powerful computer and storage systems is vital to meet the demands of Ohio’s top faculty members,” said David Hudak, executive director, OSC. “Data science, in particular, has driven exponential increases in the demand for storage to support research and analysis for various projects, such as for genomic sequencing in health care and real-time weather prediction in meteorology.“

Each year, OSC systems serve the computational and storage needs of more than 3,000 academic, government and industry researchers. The center offers each client 3 types of storage: a home directory that is backed-up daily; a project space that is usually larger than home, tuned for faster reads and backed up daily; and scratch service, which is temporary, high-throughput storage designed to support large, data-intensive computations. In addition to disk storage, OSC provides researchers with access to 10PB of long-term, tape-cartridge backup storage.

The OSC storage project will be based upon IBM Elastic Storage Server technology, an implementation of SDS featuring IBM Spectrum Scale, Version 5, file system data management software. The storage system will expand capacity for scratch and project storage, but also allow OSC to offer data encryption and full file-system audit capabilities that can support secure storage of sensitive data, such as medical data or other personally identifiable information.

“As more researchers with sensitive data sets need HPC resources, we must continue to enhance our data security and procedures to safeguard sensitive information,” said Douglas Johnson, chief systems.