OMRF Accomplishes More Big Science Research Faster with the WEKA Limitless Data Platform
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overview
WEKA provides the best I/O throughput to GPU-enabled servers reducing research job time by 10x
Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation (OMRF) manages 950TB of data—100TB active on WEKA, 250TB on a slower scale out NAS with standard file shares to satisfy a medium-term data retention strategy, and 600TB in an object storage archive. The cluster consists of standard x86 CPUs from Supermicro connected via 100Gb Ethernet switches. The system was architected to stream data from the lab to the WEKA storage via SMB. The team, who has begun experimenting with GPUs, now has peaceof-mind knowing that WEKA provides the best I/O throughput to GPU-enabled servers renderring their updated cluster architecture future-ready.
“Our scientists can more easily complete their analysis and no longer have to deal with the storage. Our old workflow was complex and time-consuming, involving staging data to a compute nodes local SSD for better application performance. With WEKA we have so much performance and expandable capacity that we don’t have to think about it”.
Stuart Glenn, Assistant Director of Infrastructure & Research Computing, OMRFTHE NEW SOLUTION HAD TO MEET SEVERAL KEY CRITERIA:
Increase in workload size, complexity, and throughput
Tier seamlessly to object storage archive
Comply with tight budget constraints
Improve storage performance to accelerate innovation
SOLUTION
WEKA LIMITLESS DATA PLATFORM ON SUPERMICRO SERVERS
By implementing the WEKA Limitless Data Platform, the OMRF team was able to achieve better throughput and run more research jobs concurrently without negatively impacting other jobs or workloads. In addition, the turn-around time is better, because the jobs finish faster the results get to the scientist quicker which accelerates the next stage of their research. The research workflows are greatly simplified, because using WEKA eliminated the complexity of staging-in and -out data into a compute node’s local SSD. Research outcomes are no longer limited by how much data can be stored on a compute node’s local SSD, with WEKA acting as a front-end they have faster and easier access to their object archive tier ensuring the applications have access to all the data. Ultimately, OMRF now has so much performance and expandable capacity available to all nodes that nobody has to think about storage any longer—instead focusing on saving lives.
Benefits and Return On Investment
OMRF research jobs were reduced 10X, one job was reduced from 70 days to 7 days; another common analysis workflow was reduced from 12 hours to 2 hours.
No limit on capacity scaling
Improvement in performance
