HP announced HP StorageWorks Scalable Fileshare (HP SFS) helped Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) win the top performance rating in the StorCloud Bandwidth Challenge at SC.05. This long-distance high-bandwidth is a requirement for delivering effective Grid access to remote supercomputing storage.

The HP SFS storage appliance delivered more than 51TB of capacity with more than 42 Gbps of bandwidth -- about 1,000 times larger than a typical laptop PC. HP SFS drove this bandwidth over a 250-mile Cisco Systems-powered WAN connection from the SC'05 show floor to PNNL's HP Integrity server cluster in Richland, Wash.

The StorCloud committee awarded PNNL the first place rating for the fastest scientific application storage bandwidth at the SC|05 conference for sustaining more than 5 Gbps during the 30-minute experiment.

The StorCloud win was awarded for PNNL's 3-D video manipulation application, part of a multi-step system developed to automate analysis of three-dimensional images generated by scientific instruments at the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory (EMSL) at PNNL. This application is part of a suite of tools designed to apply modeling and simulation to solving biology problems that include fluid dynamics, bio-chemical reaction networks and complex geometry.

In addition to the primary application, several other test applications were run, including a NWChem simulation of the formation of a Cetane (C16H34), molecule. Understanding the complex chemical reactions involved in combustion can lead to the design of more efficient combustion systems, and toward more efficient use of our fuel resources. The SC2005 StorCloud NWChem quantum chemistry application was a demonstration of the pioneering first-principles calculations needed to predict the heat of formation of Cetane, a molecule that is a key component of diesel combustion.

HP StorageWorks Scalable File Share is a storage appliance designed to scale to meet the demands of today's rapidly expanding compute clusters. It combines inexpensive industry-standard storage hardware with Open Source Lustre software technology and HP-enhanced engineering into a case-hardened storage appliance that can scale to meet virtually any cluster storage bandwidth or capacity needs.

The Cisco contributions to StorCloud included the SFS 7000 InfiniBand Server Fabric Switch, the MDS 9000 Multilayer Fabric Switch for Fibre Channel and iSCSI, and the Catalyst 6500 switching family for Gigabit Ethernet and 10 Gigabit Ethernet. This latter set of Catalyst switches, provided by Cisco, enabled PNNL to win the StorCloud Challenge.

For more information on the StorCloud Challenge, see www.hp.com/go/hptc.