Los Alamos National Laboratory has signed new Umbrella CRADA (Cooperative Research and Development Agreement) with EMC to enhance, design, build, test and deploy new cutting-edge technologies in an effort to meet some of the US’s difficult information technology challenges.
The CRADA involves six general categories of technology development in which LANL and EMC will collaborate over the next five years, including high-performance computing (HPC), data storage, cyber security, data sharing and mobility, cloud computing, large-scale analytics and materials science.
Umbrella CRADA introduces first Project Task Statement (PTS), which is focused on support for the US Department of Energy’s Exascale Initiative and other data intensive programs and the LANL and EMC collaboration for the Exascale initiative is aimed at expanding high-performance computing levels to the exaflops — a thousand-times faster than current petascale capabilities.
In addition, the Exascale initiative involves design and development of an open-source, scalable data-management middleware library called the Parallel Log Structured File System (PLFS), which will be used on a range of computing platforms from small clusters to the largest supercomputers in the world.
LANL High Performance Computing Division director Gary Grider said the PLFS concept has been shown to improve data movement at extreme scales by several orders of magnitude.
"Both EMC and LANL are interested in furthering this PLFS open source project to address the increasingly difficult data-management problems as the supercomputing world moves toward exascale-class computing," said Grider.
EMC federal chief technology officer Nick Combs said private and public collaboration will help overcome today’s technology challenges associated with the six categories outlined in this CRADA.
"Collaboration between public and private institutions — like LANL and EMC — will help the government to more cost-effectively address its needs, while delivering the industry at large with a better understanding of federal challenges to help build the right solutions," said Combs.
