Storage

Cray has a long history of providing high performance and high capacity storage for customers all the way back to the CRAY-1 with its I/O subsystem and directly attached disks and tapes. Indeed Cray has pioneered many of the storage technologies that have evolved to be commonplace in the market today, e.g. solid-state storage devices, ATA interfaces, high speed channels, file systems with separate data and metadata, data migration and round-robin I/O. Cray has taken advantage of that heritage to provide storage systems and solutions for customers that include multi-petabyte capacity, up to a quarter terabyte/sec sustained bandwidth and connectivity to incumbent file and archival systems.

Storage Partners

Today Cray partners with industry-leading storage vendors such as DDN, LSI and Sun to customize storage solutions to meet our customers’ needs. Storage on high performance systems such as the Cray XT needs to provide high throughput and capacity while maintaining overall system balance.

Local Storage vs. External I/O

Many of Cray’s systems have been directly attached to storage through Cray’s SIO (Storage I/O) nodes. This configuration provides high performance where a storage pool or file system is dedicated to one Cray system. Recently, Cray has also begun offering solutions whereby storage and file systems are shared using an external I/O capability delivered as a Cray Technical Service. The benefit of this architecture is that one shared high performance storage pool is created that can be accessed by multiple systems concurrently.

Lustre File System

Cray partners with Sun Microsystems and offers the Lustre file system as a high performance file system for Cray supercomputers. Lustre is a scalable, secure, robust, highly-available, open source cluster file system. The central goal is the development of a next-generation cluster file system which can serve clusters with 10,000's of nodes, provide petabytes of storage, and move 100's of GB/sec with state-of-the-art security and management infrastructure. Cray has experience installing and tuning Lustre to the highest levels of achievable performance.

HPC Storage

High performance computers and state-of-the-art supercomputer systems require unique solutions for storage to support the massive data sets typical of scientific research. A single application can generate hundreds of gigabytes, and HPC centers offer hundreds of terabytes for their end users. Cray offers a comprehensive set of HPC storage solutions ranging from standard storage configurations to customized data protection solutions to fee-based consulting. Cray can provide a solution to meet the specialized challenges of HPC, whether in a Cray environment or in another HPC installation.