Overview of the architecture of the 

 Nationai Storage Laboratory located at 

 NERSC. in which different networl<s are 

 used for control of the attached devices 

 and tor data transmission. This archi- 

 tecture overcomes the bottleneck in ear- 

 lier hierarchical storage designs in 

 which all of the data had to pass 

 through the control computer The tech- 

 nology will first be used in fusion energy 

 and climate modeling applications. The 

 NSL architecture is being extended in a 

 new High Performance Storage System 

 to support scalable parallel I/O and inte- 

 gration with massively parallel comput- 

 ers. 



A Cray Research Inc. C-90 supercomputer system was 

 installed in FY 1993 in the National Energy Research 

 Supercomputer Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Livermore 

 National Laboratory to provide high performance com- 

 puter technology in a full production environment for 

 DOE applications. The C-90 has 16 processors and is 

 being used in a mode that encourages the use of paral- 

 lel programming techniques. 



National Storage Laboratory (NSL) 



In concert with NASA, the NSL was established by a 

 CRADA among six industrial firms and NERSC. This 

 collaboration currently involves several DOE 

 Laboratories, about a dozen U.S. storage vendors, and 

 a university. The NSL will help serve the data storage 

 needs of researchers at the DOE and at other Federal 

 agencies and will help participating vendors develop 

 new mass storage products. 



The NSL will advance the state of the art in high perfor- 

 mance data storage systems that are capable of storing 

 terabytes of data. Such mass storage is required by 

 applications such as the Grand Challenges and those 

 requiring storage of large amounts of experimental data. 



Candidate IITA Activities 



DOE brings expertise in information technologies to the 

 task of developing the Nil. DOE has developed commu- 

 nication networks and has applied computing technology 

 to a broad range of applications and technical problems 

 addressed in collaborations involving scientists and 

 engineers located across the country as well as around 

 the world. The many DOE CRADAs are evidence of 

 industry's interest in working with the Department. DOE 

 Laboratories have a long history of collaborating with 

 research universities. 



The early deployment of the Nil is important to the suc- 

 cessful implementation of the Energy Policy Act. The 

 Nil is critical to the Act's goals of: 



-I Managing energy supply and demand. 



^Developing telecommuting to reduce energy 

 usage and provide more efficient use of the 

 Nation's human resources. 



76 



