New NERSC Resource: Global Filesystem

From: David Turner (dpturner_at_lbl.gov)
Date: 02/15/2006


Greetings NERSC User,

NERSC is pleased to announce it newest resource for users:
the NERSC Global Filesystem (NGF), based on IBM's proven
GPFS technology.  This filesystem is mounted on all NERSC
compute platforms, and provides permanent on-line storage
to qualifying projects.  Its current capacity is approximately
70 teryabytes (TB) and 50 million inodes; default quotas
are 1 TB and 250,000 inodes per project.

NGF is intended to facilitate sharing of data between
users and/or machines.  For example, if a project has
multiple users who must all access a common set of data
files, NGF will provide a common area for those files.
Alternatively, when sharing data between machines,
NGF eliminates the need to copy large datasets from one
machine to another.  For example, a user might want to
run a highly-parallel simulation on Seaborg, followed
by a serial or modestly-parallel post-processing step
on Jacquard, and then perform a data analysis or
visualization step on DaVinci.

The use of NGF can provide the following benefits:

1) Accelerate the "compute-analyze-compute" process.
2) Guarantee data consistency by eliminating multiple
    copies of critical data.
3) Improve system security by eliminating the need
    to use "group" or "world" permissions in $HOME.
4) Reduce overall disk utilization

Complete information about NGF, including details on how
to apply for a project directory, may be found at:

http://www.nersc.gov/nusers/resources/NGF/

-- 
Best regards,

David Turner
User Services Group        email: dpturner@lbl.gov
NERSC Division             phone: (510) 486-4027
Lawrence Berkeley Lab        fax: (510) 486-4316

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