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martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

+Hardware
+Software
+Techonomics

"Frontiersman" Cray Snags $50m Storage Contract for 'Largest Single Filesystem' [theregister.co.uk]:

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 [theregister.co.uk].

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 [sandisk.com] 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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