Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) Wins StorCloud Challenge at the 2005 Supercomputing Conference

Summary

For the second year in a row, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL) at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) in Richland, Washington, has been awarded top honors for the StorCloud storage competition during the November 12-18, 2005, Supercomputing meeting (SC05) in Seattle, Washington. EMSL staff and users, along with Hewlett-Packard, Cisco and other partners, demonstrated innovative storage capabilities at the conference by streaming video data at 30 to 60 gigabits/second from high-capacity Hewlett-Packard-loaned storage hardware on the show floor to HPC servers at the EMSL more than 250 miles away. EMSL used six dedicated 10-gigabit lambdas running over the PNNL Regional Optical network and DOEs UltraScience Net to transfer the equivalent of a full DVD of video every second. EMSL successfully demonstrated image feature recognition software, which analyzes 3D images and then creates a 3D model, and a Northwest Chemistry software simulation. The StorCloud Challenge is a high-bandwidth heterogeneous storage initiative to push the boundaries of high performance computing storage technologies. The annual Supercomputing conference is the premier international conference for demonstrating how high performance computing, networking, and storage leads to advances in research, education, and commerce.