Key Points
- Commodity scale-out architectures are vital to large-scale research and computing projects
- CORAID EtherDrive has been deployed in a variety of HPC projects, delivering massive capacity and throughput at a fraction of the cost of legacy SAN systems
The unique and growing challenges of High Performance Computing (HPC) and High Performance Virtual Computing (HPVC) environments are a natural fit for CORAID’s scale-out architecture. CORAID customers have employed EtherDrive in large-scale supercomputing projects including human genome research, energy research, and government security applications.
In the old days, the only way to get better computing performance was to buy a bigger mainframe or SMP supercomputer. However, the challenge of scaling these systems, and the expense of specialized hardware, led to the adoption of massively parallel processing environments built on commodity CPUs. EtherDrive brings this same scalability and price-performance to the storage tier, an increasingly critical aspect of many HPC projects.
The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI - www.genome.gov), part of the U.S. National Institutes of Health, is leading the nationwide effort to coordinate and accelerate human genome research. NHGRI has deployed more than 400 Terabytes of CORAID EtherDrive storage in multiple environments, including high-performance computing, primary storage for virtualized servers, and backup. The EtherDrive installation services more than 100,000 I/O requests per second for applications including DNA sequencing, bio-informatics, and data reduction.
With EtherDrive, system architects can:
- Start small, and simply add storage appliances to rapidly fulfill project needs
- Rapidly reconfigure existing SAN capacity, without complicated topology changes
- Leverage lightweight AoE storage networking protocol for near-bare-metal performance using 10 Gb Ethernet
