CISL Annual Report 2005 > Production cyberinfrastructure accomplishments

Storage Area Network (SAN) deployment accomplishments

During the summer of 2004, the Distributed Systems Group (DSG) became part of a joint SCD and University of Colorado (CU) effort to evaluate high-performance shared file systems. The use of high-performance shared file systems was driven by the need to share common data between diverse operating systems at speeds exceeding the use of network file systems (NFS). DSG was charged in the shared file system project to set up a testbed storage area network (SAN) that would house the ADIC StorNext shared file system between attached servers. ADIC was chosen because it works well in a heterogeneous operating system environment, similar to SCD, and it does not depend on any specific hardware vendor for components such as switches and storage units. CU would investigate the use of more Linux-specific shared file systems such as IBM's GPFS and Lustre.

There was a pressing need for the Community Data Portal (CDP) system and the main Data Support Section (DSS) server to share and provide large data sets to the outside user community. Both of these servers were running the Sun Solaris operating system. As a result, the initial test was set up to see how Sun servers interacted with the ADIC StorNext shared file system over a SAN. The Mass Storage System Group (MSSG) worked with DSG by running benchmarks for file transfer speed rates using the ADIC shared file system. These data rates were compared to speeds of directly attached storage (DAS) units. The ADIC shared file system ran at speeds comparable to the DAS systems, and it was decided to put a large shared file system into production during FY2005 between the CDP and DSS servers. The current production system contains over 20 TB of data including:

• ECMWF ERA-40 Reanalysis Data (ERA40)
• NCEP North American Regional Reanalysis Data (NARR)
• International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS)
• CME (Carbon in the Mountains Experiment) - collaboration between CGD, EOL, ACD, NASA, NOAA, and several universities
• ACD models and visualization clients code (including MOZART and TUV models) (Model for OZone And Related chemical Tracers, Tropospheric Ultraviolet and Visible radiation model)
• HIAPER test flights data
• University of Oklahoma hurricane Isabel case study
• WACCM model data (Whole Atmosphere Community Climate Model) - collaboration between ACD, HAO, and CGD
• WRF forecast for hurricane Katrina (Weather Research and Forecast model)

Architecture of the high-performance shared file system that is now providing large data sets for the Community Data Portal and the SCD Data Support Section.