The highly skilled astrogeology team advances to a scalable BeeGFS parallel cluster file system.
Government research programs, like other information-intensive operations, generate massive amounts of data from documents, large files, images, videos and emails. Since many federal agencies have been in existence for decades, data is rarely optimized to its potential in current file system environments. Performance, security and the ability to scale are often major issues due to antiquated solutions.
A celebrated astrogeology program of the U.S. government, with a rich history of planetary mapping and scientific space exploration, was experiencing these issues with its existing Lustre file system. (Traditionally, this has been a commonly used solution across many federal and state organizations.) The research program strives to better understand the origins, evolutions and geologic processes operating on celestial bodies. It is critical that its data is accessible, secure and organized.
The Challenge
The planetary research program has approximately 80 scientists, programmers, technical specialists, cartographers, student interns and administrators—plus several emeritus scientists.
Through the years, this team of specialists has participated in processing and analyzing data from numerous missions to planetary bodies in our solar system, assisting in finding potential landing sites for exploration vehicles and mapping both our neighboring planets and their moons. The data was understandably piling up and the existing Lustre system performance was suboptimal. The team required a world-class storage solution that could scale without issue.
The Solution
After a careful review of potential solutions, Advanced HPC was awarded a contract by the government to launch a BeeGFS file system environment for the program. Advanced HPC, given its extensive experience working with federal agencies, has a history of navigating efficiently through the red tape of complex contracts. The key is to stay engaged with government clients, educating them about emerging technologies, while helping them to remain in compliance with federal regulations.
“Our experience with the government is invaluable. We’ve found that our government clients who migrate from Lustre to BeeGFS are blown away by the newfound reliability and performance,” said Joe Lipman, Senior Sales Engineer of Advanced HPC. “It just works.”
BeeGFS is a world-class parallel cluster file system, developed with a strong focus on performance and designed for simplified installation and management. Since the government program runs on heavy input/output workloads, Advanced HPC’s proven BeeGFS solution was the answer. The solution was also compelling because it transparently spreads user data across multiple servers. By increasing the number of servers and disks in the system, this team of specialists can simply scale performance and capacity of the file system to the level needed. This is done seamlessly, from small clusters up to enterprise-class systems with thousands of nodes.
BeeGFS was specifically designed with data-intensive government and private-sector organizations in mind. With Advanced HPC, this renowned team of U.S. scientists can experience optimal robustness and performance in situations of high input/output workload.