| Computer
Room Expansion
Berkeley Lab began the planned expansion of NERSC’s
computer room at the Oakland Scientific Facility (OSF) to
provide space for the expanded Seaborg system. The expansion
includes removing a non-load-bearing wall and extending the
seismically enhanced raised floor, HVAC systems, chilled water
system, network cable tray systems, and laser-based smoke
detection and fire sprinkler systems. The main chilled water
system is being completed, and the rooftop cooling towers
are being upgraded with variable frequency drives for energy
efficiency. The option for additional build-out of the computer
room was extended until 2004 with no increase in rent. The
OSF was honored by Buildings Magazine with an honorable mention
in the magazine’s 2002 Modernization Awards.
Advanced Development
Currently NERSC’s major development activity for high-end
systems is the Global Unified Parallel File System (GUPFS)
project. The goal of this project is to provide a scalable,
high-performance, high-bandwidth, shared file system for all
the NERSC production computing and support systems. The GUPFS
project is divided into three phases: (1) deployment and integration
in the NERSC production environment, (2) integration with
HPSS, and (3) integration into a WAN/Grid operating environment.
In December 2001 NERSC completed the installation of the
initial Global File System (GFS) testbed, which is configured
as a parallel computational cluster to test file systems in
a realistic scientific environment. NERSC also developed relationships
with file and storage system vendors and with possible collaborators,
and began tracking existing and emerging file systems, storage
area network (SAN) fabrics, and storage technologies and trends.
Testing methodologies and benchmarks were developed for shared/cluster
file systems in a parallel environment, and initial testing
of two versions of the Sistina GFS file system was completed.
Further product evaluation and testing will continue, with
the goal of deploying GUPFS in the NERSC production environment
by 2006. In software development, NERSC successfully demonstrated
checkpoint/restart on an IBM SP development system using the
AIX 5.1 operating system and the PSSP 3.4 cluster management
tools. Checkpoint/restart will be implemented on Seaborg in
2003. Other test programs involved the Globus 2.0 Grid software,
the MPI 64-bit compiler, and HPSS statistical programs that
analyze transfers and cache.
To increase the use of visualization resources by a greater
number of users, and to make visualization more available
and efficient by bringing the application to the data, NERSC
has introduced license servers that enable visualization applications
to run on additional machines via floating licenses. Initially
deployed to Escher and Seaborg, remote license serving will
allow many users to deploy visualization applications at their
desktop in the near future. NERSC has also begun testing a
utilization logging server (ULOG) that would help monitor
and optimize the usage of visualization resources.
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