New Oxford NAS aids project management

A new network attached storage (NAS) system will play a key role in managing the high performance computing (HPC) requirements at a new research centre at the University of Oxford.

The new Oxford e-Research Centre (OeRC), due to open in September this year, will feature new a supercomputer that is designed to handle the most heavy data warehousing and complex computer modelling projects, including advanced climate simulation and prediction and the latest in medical research.

Dr Jon Lockley, manager of the Oxford Supercomputing Centre within the OeRC, said storage had, until now, been overlooked in terms of HPC requirements.

However, the establishment of the OeRC, which provides a framework and resources for multi-discipline research, highlighted the need to find a new flexible, cost-effective storage system.

"Knowing we have this multi-discipline requirement going forward meant we knew storage growth was an obvious area we needed to address," Lockley told IT PRO. "Our current system is already oversubscribed and, now that we're seeing new faces, needing new storage requirements we need to make sure our capacity can grow with our needs in future."

The Centre is not only handling the needs of classical scientists like chemists or physicists, "who need massive floating point numbers for banging galaxies together in computational simulations," but is increasingly finding the social sciences rely more on database-driven research, where "they need us to manage the runtime of their data warehousing processes," Lockley said for example.

The Centre is spending £1.2 million on a new data centre to meet these expanding requirements and house its supercomputer, which will carry out 15 trillion calculations per second - with some applications able to generate the equivalent of nearly 600 copies of the Oxford English Dictionary on CD in a single hour.

A new Pillar Axiom NAS system will handle all this information and give the Centre the flexibility to manage and create specialist file systems, as well as grow capacity at a predictable cost.

"It's very difficult to predict what users will be asking for future," said Lockley. "But we are going from 150 processors, to 1,500 in September. I can see us fairly rapidly moving that up to 2,000 processors with the next two years."

User acceptance testing is complete for the data centre's Pillar storage system, which is currently provisioned for 10 terabytes. "That will probably grow to 100TB over the next few years, but we now have a storage system to grow with it," said Lockley.

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