Storage Systems for the HPC Community: Pains and Possibilities of the "Super-Size Me" World

This IDC update summarizes the HPC User Forum's presentation of storage and data management requirements for storage systems suppliers. IDC's HPC User Forum met for the 18th time recently (April 10-12, 2006) in Richmond, Virginia, with a storage and data management technical agenda. Exploring storage systems for petascale computers was a major topic on the agenda. The HPC research team will be publishing a formal white paper of the meeting results and a second white paper with the collected supplier responses to the expressed user needs. This update summarizes the main discussions regarding storage systems at the conference. This document relies extensively on the conference notes from the meeting.