The University of North Texas (UNT) has installed a Dell/Terascala HPC Storage Solution (DT-HSS 4.5) as part of its new high-performance, campus-wide system that supports computational research.
Housed at UNT’s Central Data Center, the new cluster, Talon 2.0, replaces the original Talon system and will support approximately 55 research groups and more than 350 faculty and student researchers in a variety of fields, with top utilisation in chemistry, material sciences and physics. The 1.5 petabyte system utilises 4TB disks and includes Lustre 2.1.5.
‘To meet our rapidly growing storage needs, we were looking for a solution that would deliver the high I/O we require for the numerically intensive applications used by our researchers,’ explained Scott Yockel, Ph.D., manager of HPC Services at UNT. ‘Talon 2.0 will enable researchers to do everything faster. Additionally, we’ll be able to do research we couldn’t even attempt before, such as conducting natural language processing on text from UNT’s 100TB and growing digital library.’
Terascala provides the operating system and analytics that transform block storage and controllers from Dell, EMC, and NetApp into an easy-to-manage storage appliance that delivers multiple gigabytes per second of throughput for HPC workloads. Terascala-powered storage appliances can reduce run times to hours instead of days or weeks, delivering value both in terms of initial investment and long-term operating costs. Up and running in less than one day, Terascala’s operating system, TeraOS, simplifies managing Lustre-based storage, including failover of object and metadata server nodes.
