Section: Software and Platforms

Experimental platform

Participants : Laurent Amsaleg, Sébastien Campion [correspondent] , Patrick Gros, Pascale Sébillot.

Until 2005, we used various computers to store data and to carry out experiments. In 2005, we began work to specify and set-up dedicated equipment to experiment on very large collections of data. During 2006 and 2007, we specified, bought and installed our first complete platform. It is organized around a very large storage capacity (155TB), and contains 4 acquisition devices (for Digital Terrestrial TV), 3 video servers, and 15 computing servers partially included in the local cluster architecture (IGRIDA). A dedicated website has been developed in 2009 to provide a user support. It contains useful information such as references of available and ready to use software on the cluster, list of corpus stored on the platform, pages for monitoring disk space consumption and cluster loading, tutorials for best practices and cookbooks for treatments of large datasets. In 2010, we have acquired a new large memory server with 144GB of RAM which is used for memory demanding tasks. The previous server dedicated to this kind of jobs (acquired in 2008) has been upgraded to 96GB of RAM. In 2012, we extended our storage capacity to 215TB and expanded our computing resources with two new large memory servers with 256GB of RAM for each of them. Both have their own HPC storage of   12TB. This year our backbone network was fully upgraded in order to connect each element of the platform with a 10GB/s bandwith.

A new distributed file system architecture was design and will be implement in 2014.

The platform is funded by a joint effort of Inria, INSA Rennes and University of Rennes 1.