Browsing by Author "Simms, Stephen"

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Empowering Bioinformatics Workflows Using the Lustre Wide Area File System across a 100 Gigabit Network
(2012-09-11) Simms, Stephen; Seiffert, Kurt
Managing the profusion and accumulated volumes of life-science data is cumbersome; transferring them can require anything from shipping a hard drive to paying a graduate student to babysit transfers. Indiana University’s Data Capacitor solves this problem by exporting a high-performance Lustre file system across wide area networks to multiple locations. A mounted file system lets researchers run simple and familiar commands without having to contend with special tools for data transfer. Moreover, multiple mounts let researchers compute against their data from anywhere. To meet the insatiable bandwidth demands of life scientists, network infrastructure providers are increasingly offering 100 Gigabit circuits. IU recently used Lustre across a 100 Gigabit network spanning 2,300 miles to demonstrate application performance across a great distance. This presentation will describe the Data Capacitor cyber infrastructure and associated work, explore future use cases applicable to bioinformatics, and explain how the National Center for Genome Analysis Support (NCGAS) at Indiana University intends to integrate the Data Capacitor into their workflows.
Performance and quality of service of data and video movement over a 100 Gbps testbed
(Elsevier, 2013-01) Kluge, Michael; Simms, Stephen; William, Thomas; Henschel, Robert; Georgi, Andy; Meyer, Christian; Mueller, Matthias S.; Stewart, Craig A.; Wünsch, Wolfgang; Nagel, Wolfgang E.
Digital instruments and simulations are creating an ever-increasing amount of data. The need for institutions to acquire these data and transfer them for analysis, visualization, and archiving is growing as well. In parallel, networking technology is evolving, but at a much slower rate than our ability to create and store data. Single fiber 100 Gbps networking solutions are soon to be deployed as national infrastructure. This article describes our experiences with data movement and video conferencing across a networking testbed, using the first commercially available single fiber 100 Gbps technology. The testbed is unique in its ability to be configured for a total length of 60, 200, or 400 km, allowing for tests with varying network latency. We performed low-level TCP tests and were able to use more than 99.9% of the theoretical available bandwidth with minimal tuning efforts. We used the Lustre file system to simulate how end users would interact with a remote file system over such a high performance link. We were able to use 94.4% of the theoretical available bandwidth with a standard file system benchmark, essentially saturating the wide area network. Finally, we performed tests with H.323 video conferencing hardware and Quality of service (QoS) settings, showing that the link can reliably carry a full high-definition stream. Overall, we demonstrated the practicality of 100 Gbps networking and Lustre as excellent tools for data management.
SCI: ETF Early Operations - Indiana University
(2006-06-20) Stewart, Craig A.; Voss, Brian D.; McRobbie, Michael A.; Shankar, Anurag; Simms, Stephen; McCaulay, D. Scott
Technical Report: Distributed Parallel Computing Using Windows Desktop Systems
(2003) Hart, David; Grover, Douglas; Liggett, Matt; Repasky, Richard; Shields, Corey; Simms, Stephen; Sweeny, Adam; Wang, Peng
Like many large institutions, Indiana University has thousands of desktop computers devoted primarily to running office productivity applications on the Windows operating system, tasks which are necessary but that do not use the computers’ full capacity. This is a resource worth pursuing. However, the individual desktop systems do not offer enough processing power for a long enough period of time to complete large scientific computing applications. Some form of distributed, parallel programming is required, to make them worth the chase. They must be instantly available to their primary users, so they are available only intermittently. This has been a serious stumbling block: currently available communications libraries for distributed computing do not support such a dynamic communications world well. This paper introduces Simple Message Broker Library (SMBL), which provides the flexibility needed to take advantage of such ephemeral resources.
The Data Capacitor Project and Digital Library Development
(Indiana University Digital Library Program, 2006-02-22) Simms, Stephen; Dunn, Jon
Usage of Indiana University computation and data cyberinfrastructure in FY 2011/2012 and assessment of future needs
(2013-06-07) Link, Matthew R.; Hancock, David Y.; Seiffert, Kurt; Simms, Stephen; Michael, Scott; Stewart, Craig A.
This report details the past and current cyberinfrastructure resources that have been deployed by the Research Technologies (RT) division of University Information Technologies Services to support research and scholarly activities at IU. This report also presents data and detailed analysis of system usage and services supported by RT for the FY 2011/2012 period, projects future usage trends based on these data, and provides several recommendations for the most effective ways to meet the growing need for high performance computing resources in research and scholarly endeavors.
What is Cyberinfrastructure?
(ACM, 2010-10) Stewart, Craig A.; Simms, Stephen; Plale, Beth; Link, Matthew R.; Hancock, David Y.; Fox, Geoffrey C.
Cyberinfrastructure is a word commonly used but lacking a single, precise definition. One recognizes intuitively the analogy with infrastructure, and the use of cyber to refer to thinking or computing – but what exactly is cyberinfrastructure as opposed to information technology infrastructure? Indiana University has developed one of the more widely cited definitions of cyberinfrastructure: "Cyberinfrastructure consists of computing systems, data storage systems, advanced instruments and data repositories, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and high performance networks to improve research productivity and enable breakthroughs not otherwise possible." A second definition, more inclusive of scholarship generally and educational activities, has also been published and is useful in describing cyberinfrastructure: "Cyberinfrastructure consists of systems, data and information management, advanced instruments, visualization environments, and people, all linked together by software and advanced networks to improve scholarly productivity and enable knowledge breakthroughs and discoveries not otherwise possible." In this paper, we describe the origin of the term cyberinfrastructure based on the history of the root word infrastructure, discuss several terms related to cyberinfrastructure, and provide several examples of cyberinfrastructure.
White Paper: Lustre WAN over 100Gbps
(2016-02) Thota, Abhinav; Henschel, Robert; Simms, Stephen
This work is an international collaboration with Rheinisch-Westfälische Technische Hochschule Aachen, Germany (RWTH) and the Center of Information Services and High Performance Computing (ZIH) at Technische Universität Dresden, Germany to analyze the effect of a high-bandwidth high-latency link on the I/O patterns of scientific applications using the 100Gbps transatlantic link.