PDSI Seminars

Wednesday March 25, 2009
1 pm - 2:20 pm
BH 136A, the Adamson Wing

STORAGE FOR PETASCALE COMPUTING

John Bent, Los Alamos National Lab

The fastest supercomputer in the world right now is Los Alamos National Lab's Roadrunner Petaflop Supercomputer. The process of bringing this machine online and preparing it for users has been ongoing for the past several months. This talk will discuss many of the challenges involved as well as some of LANL's unique solutions. Although the emphasis will be on the scratch storage system, there will be some discussion of the network, the hybrid cell architecture, and the expected workloads. At the end of the talk, there will also be a brief description of several of the presenter's other ongoing research projects.

John Bent is a LANL storage researcher who has been heavily involved with the Roadrunner storage system from early planning to intensive troubleshooting during this installation period. John is also leading LANL's data-intensive computing effort, is developing a virtual interposition file system, is working closely with Panasas to debug and design their parallel file system, is collecting and releasing many parallel IO traces, and is mentoring several graduate student projects. John got his PhD in computer science from Wisconsin in 2005 and his bachelors in anthropology from Amherst College in 1995.

Slides - PDF [5.5M]