Building the world’s fastest storage system

ORNL is a national multi-program research and development facility managed by UT-Battelle for the U.S. Department of Energy. The Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) was established at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in 2004 with the mission of providing leadership computing for scientists working on some of the world’s most pressing problems.

Titan is designed to deliver a peak capability of over 27,000 trillion calculations per second, or 27 petaflops, a system that is over ten times more powerful than previous generations of ORNL computers.

For the growing number of problems where experiments are impossible, dangerous, or inordinately costly, advances of this compute magnitude offer the benefit of immediate and transformative insights in energy, national security, the environment and the economy, as well as to answer fundamental scientific questions.

Using DDN’s SFA12K-40 storage systems as the backbone for Spider II, this new file storage system is designed with 40 petabytes of raw capacity and is capable of ingesting, storing, processing and distributing research data at unprecedented speed. This amount of storage capacity is equivalent to more than 227,000 miles of stacked books – or the distance from ORNL’s facility in Oak Ridge, TN to the moon – and enables ORNL to dramatically increase Titan’s computational efficiency and deliver vastly more accurate predictive models than ever before.

As the de facto standard in storage for the world’s leading supercomputers, DDN continues to push the frontiers of science and technology from laptop to petaflop, building on its $100M investment in extreme scale computing and commitment to the DOE’s FastForward program to pave the road to exascale.

DDN Sets Standard for High Performance Computing

After a competitive review of scale out storage alternatives, ORNL selected the DDN SFA12K-40 as the high-throughput building block for its Lustre® parallel file system. Once installed, the platform will deliver performance in excess of 10x what is achievable with contemporary scale-out NAS systems.

Building on a decade of ORNL and DDN optimizations for the Lustre file system, the DDN system will be configured with Lustre performance of over one terabyte per second to meet the demands of Titan’s 299,008 CPU cores.

The ORNL Spider II configuration from DDN includes:
- 36 DDN SFA12K-40 systems, each with 1.12PB of raw storage capacity;
- Over 40PB of raw capacity in only 36 data center racks;
- A combined 20,000 disk drives in a single system.

The combination of DDN’s and ORNL’s expertise in scaling Lustre in production environments will enable Titan to perform approximately six times faster with three times the capacity of its predecessor, Spider.

Architecturally unique in many ways, Titan’s power, scalability and efficiency serve as a showcase for the requirements of tomorrow as high performance computing (HPC) technologies continue to be adopted across the enterprise for Big Data computing.