LSI recently announced that the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has deployed a system utilizing LSI 6Gb/s SAS RAID controllers with LSI CacheCade cache tiering software to explore some of the unprecedented data storage challenges that will come with the Dark Energy Survey. The Dark Energy Survey is a large-scale, multinational effort to study the acceleration of the expanding universe. Involving more than 120 scientists from 23 institutions, it will be one of the most data-intensive astronomical research projects ever conceived.
LSI reseller partner International Computer Concepts built the system for NCSA around the LSI MegaRAID SAS 9260-8i low-profile MD2 eight-port controller and innovative LSI CacheCade software for I/O performance acceleration. The system is designed to deliver the performance, throughput and scalability required to store and process approximately 200TB of raw image data in a database that is expected to grow by 400GB daily over the one and a half year life of the project.
LSI CacheCade software enables solid-state drives (SSDs) to act as a secondary tier of high-performance controller cache in front of hard drives, accelerating application and workload performance. The technology has helped to accelerate the performance of NCSA's hard disk drive (HDD) arrays by enabling three 160GB SSDs to be configured as an additional high-performance read cache resource available to the controller. The solution has enabled NCSA to reduce the time required to create database indices from four and six hours to only 15 minutes, an approximately 20x performance improvement. NCSA expects the performance benefits to grow linearly from adding up to three more 9260-8i cards with CacheCade software per system.
Additional information about the NCSA solution is available at
http://www.lsi.com/downloads/Public/Direct%20Assets/LSI/casestudy_ICC-NSCA.pdf.
LSI will be demonstrating MegaRAID cards with CacheCade software at the 2011 International Supercomputing Conference (Stand #341) taking place this week in Hamburg, Germany.
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