Scalable Animation Display

Dave Bremer
Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Blockbuster is a scalable animation display application that relies on the combined power of a cluster of visualization nodes to perform rendering in parallel. During a Blockbuster run, each node in the cluster reads large chunks of data in parallel from different sections of a single scientific data-set. As such, this application will need to use a high-speed parallel filesystem in order to keep up with the rendering speed for the high resolution animation on large panel displays.

The proposed configuration for this application is:

• A 16-node visualization cluster from Dell interconnected via Gigabit Ethernet
• The IBM GPFS parallel filesystem using either iSCSI or FC storage provided by StorCloud
• Access of the iSCSI storage via two 10-Gigabit Ethernet drops at the ASC booth to the Intransa iSCSI Storage at the StorCloud booth
• Access of the FC storage via sixteen FC drops at the ASC booth to FC storage at the StorCloud booth

Industry Partners:

• Dell
• IBM
• Intransa
• Force10 Networks
• StorageTek
• Cisco