NEC and Quobyte Deliver Complete Storage Solution Stack to HLRS Supercomputing Site
SANTA CLARA, Calif. and DUSSELDORF, Germany, June 25, 2018 — Quobyte Inc., a leading developer of modern storage system software, and NEC Deutschland GmbH, a leading provider of HPC solutions, announced today that they have delivered a complete storage solution to supercomputing site HLRS (High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart) to fulfill their commercial and research HPC requirements. The HLRS facility is one of the top 20 supercomputing sites in the world and is amongst the top three in Germany. The facility is used by researchers and industry groups who typically run HPC workloads focused on Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Physics, Transport and Climate, Structural Mechanics, Chemistry, Bioinformatics, and Electrical Engineering.
Quobyte and NEC’s solution is based on NEC hardware plus Quobyte’s Data Center File System software to improve HLRS’s workload efficiency by providing a modern file system alternative to aged storage architectures. The combined system with a native S3 interface makes data ingestion and processing a breeze and is unique among storage systems, creating a single namespace for all of HLRS’s data assets. The system scales to hundreds of PBs without increasing the administrative burden and handles workloads of hundreds of millions of small files with ease. Multitenancy and ACLs enable secure and strict separation of concerns so that different research teams and companies can use and work on the same infrastructure simultaneously. In addition, Quobyte’s monitoring tools, health manager, and dashboard provide a near real-time overview of the cluster’s status and health, affording storage administrators the ability to drill into all the details they need to operate efficiently.
“We are very pleased to have our NEC-Quobyte solution accepted by such a prestigious institution as HLRS as it proves that our software delivers the IOPS performance that’s required for running compute intensive HPC workloads such as Computational Fluid Dynamics, Physics, Transport and Climate and Structural Mechanics,” said Felix Hupfeld, Quobyte Co-Founder and CTO. “NEC has great expertise in the enterprise/commercial HPC/supercomputing arena and their trust in our Data Center File System in complementing their HPC solution validates our ability to deliver all the features that an enterprise system requires. Our software storage with automated and self-healing functionality provides HLRS with a seamless integration of S3 object storage and a fast and reliable parallel file system that not only eliminates the need to make internal data migrations before data processing but significantly reduces operational costs by lifting administrative burdens from their storage administrators.”
“Quobyte’s development experience in hyperscale storage solutions at Google are part of the DNA now ingrained in their unified, secure, self-healing global file system which is the foundation for our hardware platform,” added Erich Focht, Chief Software Architect at NEC Deutschland GmbH. “Our combined solution affords HLRS an easily configurable system that scales as their performance and capacity requirements grow without having to add additional manpower, while also offering a secure S3 interface for data ingestion coupled with the benefits of using a fast parallel file system.”
“The NEC-Quobyte system has allowed us to significantly reduce our administrative burden in setting up and maintaining our HPC cluster, which is now accomplished in software with a single namespace storage pool,” concluded Uwe Sauter of HLRS. “Our daily schedule has become much easier due to Quobyte’s self-managing/self-healing lights-out functionality – automatically scaling performance and capacity as the need requires with very little administrative intervention, resulting in a win-win for all.”
Quobyte and NEC are both exhibiting at the ISC High Performance 2018 Exhibition and Conference in Frankfurt, Germany, from June 24–28, 2018 in booth K-415 and G-731 respectively.
About Quobyte
Building on a decade of research and experience with the open-source distributed file system XtreemFS and from working on Google’s infrastructure, Quobyte delivers on the promise of software defined storage for the world’s most demanding application environments including High Performance Computing (HPC), Media & Entertainment (M&E), Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Quobyte uniquely leverages hyperscaler parallel distributed file system technologies to unify file, block, and object storage. This allows customers to easily replace storage silos with a single, scalable storage system — significantly saving manpower, money, and time spent on storage management. Quobyte allows companies to scale storage capacity and performance linearly on commodity hardware while eliminating the need to expand administrative staff through the software’s ability to self-monitor, self-maintain, and self-heal. Please visit www.quobyte.com for more information.
About NEC Deutschland GmbH
NEC Deutschland GmbH is a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Europe Ltd. and is a leading provider of HPC solutions, focusing on sustained performance for real-life scientific and engineering applications. To achieve this goal NEC delivers technology and professional services to industry and academia. Linux-based HPC clusters as well as our high-end vector systems meet the different needs of different customers in the most flexible way. Energy-efficiency is one of the key design objectives, addressed by advanced cooling technologies or by the high-bandwidth vector-architecture, which delivers unprecedented efficiency on real world code. The service capabilities from the operation of complex systems to the optimization of scientific codes and NEC’s storage-appliances complete our solution offering.
About HLRS
The High Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS) is one of the top 3 German supercomputing sites which together form the German Gauss Centre for Supercomputing (GCS). It provides cutting edge supercomputing technology and services to German and European researchers and companies in engineering and the automotive industries. HLRS’s supercomputer Hazel Hen, a Cray XC40 system, currently ranks number 19 on the TOP 500 list of the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The HPGMG benchmark in 2016 even classified it as the second best performing supercomputer under real-world conditions. Please visit https://www.hlrs.de/home/ for more information.
Source: Quobyte
