Abstract
Some veterans in the HPC industry semi- facetiously define supercomputers as devices that convert compute-bound problems into I/O-bound problems. Effective utilization of large high performance computing resources often requires access to large amounts of fast storage. The National Institute for Computational Sciences (NICS) operates Kraken, a 1.17 PetaFLOPS Cray XT5 for the National Science Foundation (NSF). Kraken’s primary file system has migrated from Lustre 1.6 to 1.8 and is currently being moved to servers external to the machine. Additional bandwidth will be made available by mounting the NICS-wide Lustre file system. Newer versions of Lustre, beyond what Cray provides, are under evaluation for stability and performance. Over the past several years of operation, Kraken’s Lustre file system has evolved to be extremely stable in an effort to better serve Kraken’s users.
