Grid Meter » IBM developerWorks: Managing Big Data Sets on TeraGrid

May 10, 2006 | Comments: (0)

IBM developerWorks: Managing Big Data Sets on TeraGrid

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IBM developerWorks ran an article yesterday that looks at the two major data management approaches in the TeraGrid. TeraGrid is a massive Grid delivering computational resources to support scientific discovery. The Grid delivers 50 teraflops of computing power, 2 petabytes of rotating storage -- and supports seven different operating systems and a dozen distinct system architectures.

Even before TeraGrid secured an additional $150 million in funding earlier last year, the community at large has been following TeraGrid closely to observe how it reconciles the huge data demands of the research scientists tapping into its power. The top disciplines using it are chemistry, physics and molecular biology -- all of which have tremendous data sets under their purview, and all of which heavily rely on the ability to transfer, compile and analyze these data sets to drive scientific discovery.

In another recent TeraGrid press release, it's not just big science using TeraGrid, at least not directly. Scientists recently used TeraGrid to create a graphic simulation of the collision of two galaxies that will be used in the finale of a new planetarium show for the American Museum of Natural History.

The IBM article drills down on TeraGrid's use of GridFTP -- the popular extension to the FTP protocol that specifically enables large data transfer for Grids. The article also discusses TeraGrid's use of IBM's GPFS-WAN file system, which has introduced some interesting new features and security capabilities for providing a parallel file system on a Grid.

Posted by Greg Nawrocki on May 10, 2006 08:38 AM

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