Computational scientists from the William R. Wiley Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory (EMSL), the Pacific Northwest national Laboratory (PNNL), collaborators from Silicon Gaphics, Inc. (SGI), and other commercial partners received the "Most Innovatice Use of Storage" award at the Supercomputing Conference (SC2004) in Putsburgh Pennsylvania in November 2004. The PNNL/EMSL/SGI team won the award for an archive storage system that combines commodity storage and the LustreTM file system with the PNNL-developed Active Storage, a technology that exploits underused computationa resources of Lustre™ servers wherecontents of files are stored. This system was developed to store the large quantities of data being generated by the high-throughput proteomics research being conducted in the EMSL. The StorCloud Challenge was a competition that allowed participants to showcase ho off-the-shelf components could be assembled at the conference to build "storage-on-request" area network capabilitiey to support researchers and demonstrate high-bandwidth applications. StorCloud showcases evolutionary and revolutionalry high-performance computing storage technologies for storing simulation data in active memory. Large memory capacity will be critical for more complex computational simulations, including protein sequence analyses, or calculations such as determining moilecular energies using quantum chemistry approaches. Further information on the StorCloud initiative can be found at http://www.vtksolutions.com/StorCloud/2005/index.html, and additional information on the PNNL/EMSL/SGI StorCloud award is available at http://www.emsl.pnl.gov/docs/inbriefs/active_storage20050131.pdf.
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3/11/05