Workshop Report - Pervasive Technology Institute - Indiana University

Workshop participants and members of the public were invited to submit white papers for
consideration by workshop participants. Four white papers were submitted, which are included here
in their entirety.
Appendix 2.1. Bridging Resources Using Lustre as a Wide Area
Filesystem
Stephen Simms, Indiana University
Difficulties with data movement between resources and data management across administrative
domains can create barriers for the process of scientific discovery. Indiana Universtity believes that
the use of a wide area filesystem can be a very effective way to facilitate data sharing across distance
and enable workflows spanning geographically distributed resources. The goal of this paper is to
provide a few examples of how Indiana University has used the Lustre filesystem to span a single
campus and bridge multiple campuses.
In 2005 the NSF granted $1.72 million to Indiana University for the construction of a storage
facility, which we called the Data Capacitor. The goal of the system was to provide users with a
high speed, high capacity filesystem for the short to mid-term storage of large research data sets. We
chose the parallel distributed Lustre filesystem because of its scalability, speed, and ability to serve
many clients. The Data Capacitor sits at the center of IU’s cyberinfrastructure where it participates
in all phases of the data lifecycle. As part of the grant we constructed 10Gb pipes to campus
laboratories in order to permit a fast path between instruments and the Data Capacitor filesystem.
We created a bridge between those campus resources and local cyberinfrastructure. At the same
Figure 1. Data Capacitor spanning campus resources
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