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posted by chromas on Wednesday June 19 2019, @05:49AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-is-that-in-Libraries-of-Congress? dept.

"Frontiersman" Cray Snags $50m Storage Contract for 'Largest Single Filesystem':

Cray has won a $50m-plus contract to provide 1 exabyte of ClusterStor storage for Oak Ridge National Laboratory's (ORNL) Frontier exascale supercomputer in the United States.

Frontier is a $600m-plus Cray-AMD exascale system, rated at up to 1.5 exaFLOPS, due to be delivered in 2021 with acceptance in 2022. It will be a follow-on to ORNL's 200 petaFLOPS Summit supercomputer.

Cray won the Frontier bid with its Shasta supercomputer, powered by AMD EPYC processors and Radeon Instinct GPUs in May, so the associated storage contract is not unexpected.

[...] It will have 1 exabyte of ClusterStor hybrid flash and disk storage in 40 cabinets with a direct Slingshot connection to the compute nodes. The ClusterStor nodes will run the Lustre parallel file system with ZFS local volumes all in POSIX-compliant global namespace. The system will output 10TB/sec, four times that of Summit's 2.5TB/sec Spectrum Scale storage.

Cray claimed it will be the largest single filesystem in the world. The flash will be used for high-speed scratch space with the disk being the capacity store. Files will be tiered between the two types of storage and the system is designed to cope with random, small file access and large file streaming. There will be a new software stack for tiering and improved manageability. It will help scaling across both compute and storage.

Let's see here. Kilo, mega, giga, tera, peta, exa, ... How far we have come! My first personal computer had 4 KB of memory and stored programs to cassette tape. These days, most cell phones have at least 8 or 16 GB of storage, often 32 or 64 GB, and one can even buy 1 TB microSD cards. That is not even close to what is mentioned in this announcement. You would need 1,000,000 of these 1 TB cards to provide the storage announced here.


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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by takyon on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:25AM (1 child)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday June 19 2019, @09:25AM (#857375) Journal

    It says the bulk of it is on hard disks. 1 exabyte is 62,500 16 TB hard drives.

    NAND has the density advantage now (imagine a bucket filled with 1 TB microSD cards), but nobody here trusts it given the endurance and retention downgrades. Though the same increase in layers to 128 and beyond helps SLC wherever that is still used.

    We need a new technology that is re-writable, has unpowered data retention, and is at least as fast and dense as NAND (using 3D stacking), but with much greater endurance. Eventually, home users should be able to obtain exabytes of whatever this post-NAND storage turns out to be (memristors, RRAM, holographic crystals, etc.).

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  • (Score: 2) by Freeman on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:45PM

    by Freeman (732) on Wednesday June 19 2019, @04:45PM (#857508) Journal

    Superman storage crystals, here we come!

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