Storage Networking World Convention

For the 2008 convention, check my blog.

This is a convention I went to from April 16^th-19^th, 2007.

It was held at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California. I also stayed in the Hyatt during this convention.

Talks

IP Storage Protocols: iSCSI

John Hufferd, Brocade Inc.

• PDU - Protocol Data Unit
• TOE - TCP/IP Over Ethernet
• iSNS - Internet Storage Network Server

• iSCSI Boot
  • Static
    • Bios must support it
    • May be an adapter
  • DHCP
    • More flexible
  • PXE Boot
    • Everything can be done in software

• Spoke with Todd Burkey of Xiotech, who works with storage communications over InfiniBand.

Storage Grid: Relevance and Overview

Abbot Schindler, Hewlett Packard

• FAN - File Area Network

PCI Express, Infiniband, and Storage

Ron Emerick, Sun Microsystems
Paul Millard, Xyratex

• Fibrechannel over Ethernet
• PCIe - External connections
• PCIe IOV - IO Virtualization

The Infiniband Revolution

Full Title: The InfiniBand Revolution: Parallel Computing is Out-Screaming High-Performance Clusters are in

Lloyd Dickman, Qlogic

Open Fabrics Alliance - working to bring about single fabric

Check out compute cluster IB Storage - Direct connect IB to storage, thus bypassing IO servers

IB Optical transcievers - 100m Length

QSFP pluggable modules - next generation

FC latency - 20µsec

Look up things on ISER technology - There appears to be nothing covering it at this conference.

36 Gigaflops to 18 Teraflops in 30 days

Full title: 36 Gigaflops to 18 Teraflops in 30 days: Implementation of the Fastest Academic Supercomputer in the United Kingdom

Paul Calleja, University of Cambridge

Cambridge used MOAB for their scheduling software.

Exludus - prefetches data to local storage for use

Had many problems with 10gbit ethernet cards - eventually settled on Chelsio cards after much testing.