As a fundamental part of the high-performance computing ecosystem, the National Center for Computational Sciences (NCCS) offers advanced file systems and storage solutions to users and collaborators across its programs. A team of systems engineers manages the entire lifecycle of high-performance scratch and archival storage systems – from requirements gathering to decommissioning – and collaborates with labs, vendors, and partners to anticipate future storage needs. Current systems include nearline storage and the archival mass-storage High-Performance Storage System, or HPSS.
The NCCS also deploys advanced file systems in tandem with its supercomputers. Alpine, an IBM Spectrum Scale parallel file system, serves as the global scratch file system for all of the OLCF’s computational resources and can move data at a rate of 2.5 terabytes per second. A new file system, called Orion, will debut alongside Frontier in 2022.