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Peter Braam | |
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Born | Peter J. Braam |
Alma mater |
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Known for | Lustre File System, Intermezzo File System, Coda File System |
Scientific career | |
Fields | Mathematics, Computer science |
Institutions | |
Thesis | Magnetic Monopoles and Hyperbolic Three-manifolds (1987) |
Doctoral advisor | Michael Atiyah |
Website | www |
Peter J. Braam is a Dutch-American computer scientist, mathematician and entrepreneur focused on large-scale computing. As an academic, Braam held senior faculty positions at the University of Utah, Oxford, Carnegie Mellon, and visiting or adjunct positions at the University of British Columbia, the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the University of Cambridge.
Transitioning into the computing industry, Braam created the Lustre parallel file system, which has become a key product for large-scale HPC. He founded or co-founded 6 startups and held executive roles at public companies including Turbolinux, Sun Microsystems, and Xyratex. From 2013, he has contributed to the computing architecture for the SKA telescope and has researched solutions for data-intensive computing.
Braam was born in Utrecht, Netherlands. His undergraduate and postgraduate studies took place at Utrecht University and the University of Oxford. He was a doctoral student of Sir Michael Atiyah at Oxford, and obtained a DPhil (PhD) in 1987 for a thesis entitled Magnetic Monopoles and Hyperbolic Three-manifolds. [1]
In 1987 Braam became a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford, and a C&C Huygens Fellow of the Netherlands Science Foundation. [2] He became a tenured associate professor at University of Utah, then a university lecturer and tutorial fellow at St Catherine's College, Oxford University (1990–1997). [3]
Braam worked under the supervision of Michael Atiyah and many other mathematicians including Hans Duistermaat, Simon Donaldson, and Graeme Segal and he published papers on differential topology, gauge theories, conformal field theories, algebraic geometry and partial differential equations. [4] [5]
Braam's students included; Jacob Kalkman, Jorge Devoto, Ian McAllister, Daniel Elton, Carlos Valero, Matthew Selby and Sharad Agnihorti. [4]
Working directly with Watts Humphrey, he took extensive formal and accredited training at the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) in managing software engineering, architecture, and evaluation.
Braam started teaching for the Computing Laboratory in Oxford University (1994–1996), followed by taking up a Senior Systems Scientist Faculty position at Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science from 1997 to 2005, where he took over leadership of the Coda project. [6] [7] During this time he created the InterMezzo file system [8] and laid the foundation for Lustre. [9]
In 1999, Braam introduced Lustre, an open-source parallel distributed file system mainly used for supercomputing and is offered as a service in Amazon Web Services. [10] Since June 2005, it has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, and more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world., [11] including the world's No. 2 and No. 3 ranked TOP500 supercomputers in 2014. [12]
Braam founded or co-founded 6 startup companies of which 4 had their assets acquired. [13] [14] He has served in senior executive positions at Turbolinux, Sun Microsystems, [15] and Xyratex. [16] Lustre remains the best known legacy having become the de facto file system for HPC, allowing Braam to work with hundreds of the world's largest research computing facilities, and dozens of the largest IT companies who resold Lustre. [17] [18] During this period, he contributed to and designed several other storage products of which several reached the market. This includes key features of Linux's Ext4 file system, the InterMezzo technology which was licensed by two startups using it as their base technology, an MLS secure storage system for the US Department of Defense (DOD) and new approaches to RAID. [19] He introduced architectures targeting exa-scale storage architectures such as Colibri [20] which Xyratex acquired and became Seagate's Mero [21] product. He founded and led the Exascale IO Workgroup (EIOW) [22] [23] [24] which influenced other projects. He was one of the founding advisors creating the EC Horizon 2020 Exascale program in 2012. [25]
Since 2013, Braam has worked as a scientific consultant with Cambridge University on the Square Kilometer Array (SKA) radio telescope project, [26] studying programming language frameworks and computer architecture to address performance problems and created industrial relations. [27] He introduced the SEI software processes into the SKA project. [28] As a consultant he advised partners in the European Processor Initiative. From 2019, Braam has been a visiting professor of physics at Oxford University. [29]
Braam has been involved with different philanthropic activities. He has endowed the Peter J Braam Junior Research Fellowship and Graduate Scholarship in Human Well Being at Merton College, Oxford, and made a Bequest for a larger effort in this area. [2] These projects have supported the creation of a series of Early Career Fellowships at Merton, as well as at other colleges and departments at the University. [30] [31]
A supercomputer is a type of computer with a high level of performance as compared to a general-purpose computer. The performance of a supercomputer is commonly measured in floating-point operations per second (FLOPS) instead of million instructions per second (MIPS). Since 2017, supercomputers have existed which can perform over 1017 FLOPS (a hundred quadrillion FLOPS, 100 petaFLOPS or 100 PFLOPS). For comparison, a desktop computer has performance in the range of hundreds of gigaFLOPS (1011) to tens of teraFLOPS (1013). Since November 2017, all of the world's fastest 500 supercomputers run on Linux-based operating systems. Additional research is being conducted in the United States, the European Union, Taiwan, Japan, and China to build faster, more powerful and technologically superior exascale supercomputers.
InterMezzo was a distributed file system written for the Linux kernel, distributed under the GNU General Public License. It was included in the standard Linux kernel from version 2.4.15 but was dropped from version 2.6. InterMezzo is designed to work on top of an existing journaling file system such as ext3, JFS, ReiserFS or XFS. It was developed around 1999.
Cray Inc., a subsidiary of Hewlett Packard Enterprise, is an American supercomputer manufacturer headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It also manufactures systems for data storage and analytics. Several Cray supercomputer systems are listed in the TOP500, which ranks the most powerful supercomputers in the world.
Lustre is a type of parallel distributed file system, generally used for large-scale cluster computing. The name Lustre is a portmanteau word derived from Linux and cluster. Lustre file system software is available under the GNU General Public License and provides high performance file systems for computer clusters ranging in size from small workgroup clusters to large-scale, multi-site systems. Since June 2005, Lustre has consistently been used by at least half of the top ten, and more than 60 of the top 100 fastest supercomputers in the world, including the world's No. 1 ranked TOP500 supercomputer in November 2022, Frontier, as well as previous top supercomputers such as Fugaku, Titan and Sequoia.
EPCC, formerly the Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre, is a supercomputing centre based at the University of Edinburgh. Since its foundation in 1990, its stated mission has been to accelerate the effective exploitation of novel computing throughout industry, academia and commerce.
The TOP500 project ranks and details the 500 most powerful non-distributed computer systems in the world. The project was started in 1993 and publishes an updated list of the supercomputers twice a year. The first of these updates always coincides with the International Supercomputing Conference in June, and the second is presented at the ACM/IEEE Supercomputing Conference in November. The project aims to provide a reliable basis for tracking and detecting trends in high-performance computing and bases rankings on HPL benchmarks, a portable implementation of the high-performance LINPACK benchmark written in Fortran for distributed-memory computers.
Sun Constellation System is an open petascale computing environment introduced by Sun Microsystems in 2007.
High Productivity Computing Systems (HPCS) is a DARPA project for developing a new generation of economically viable high productivity computing systems for national security and industry in the 2002–10 timeframe.
Petascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least 1015 floating point operations per second (1 petaFLOPS). Petascale computing allowed faster processing of traditional supercomputer applications. The first system to reach this milestone was the IBM Roadrunner in 2008. Petascale supercomputers were succeeded by exascale computers.
The National Computational Infrastructure is a high-performance computing and data services facility, located at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra, Australian Capital Territory. The NCI is supported by the Australian Government's National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Strategy (NCRIS), with operational funding provided through a formal collaboration incorporating CSIRO, the Bureau of Meteorology, the Australian National University, Geoscience Australia, the Australian Research Council, and a number of research intensive universities and medical research institutes.
Exascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1018 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (exaFLOPS)"; it is a measure of supercomputer performance.
BeeGFS is a parallel file system, developed and optimized for high-performance computing. BeeGFS includes a distributed metadata architecture for scalability and flexibility reasons. Its most used and widely known aspect is data throughput.
The K computer – named for the Japanese word/numeral "kei" (京), meaning 10 quadrillion (1016) – was a supercomputer manufactured by Fujitsu, installed at the Riken Advanced Institute for Computational Science campus in Kobe, Hyōgo Prefecture, Japan. The K computer was based on a distributed memory architecture with over 80,000 compute nodes. It was used for a variety of applications, including climate research, disaster prevention and medical research. The K computer's operating system was based on the Linux kernel, with additional drivers designed to make use of the computer's hardware.
Several centers for supercomputing exist across Europe, and distributed access to them is coordinated by European initiatives to facilitate high-performance computing. One such initiative, the HPC Europa project, fits within the Distributed European Infrastructure for Supercomputing Applications (DEISA), which was formed in 2002 as a consortium of eleven supercomputing centers from seven European countries. Operating within the CORDIS framework, HPC Europa aims to provide access to supercomputers across Europe.
Open Scalable File Systems, Inc. (OpenSFS) is a nonprofit organization promoting the Lustre file system. OpenSFS was founded in 2010 to ensure Lustre remains vendor-neutral, open, and free.
Summit or OLCF-4 is a supercomputer developed by IBM for use at Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF), a facility at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, capable of 200 petaFLOPS thus making it the 5th fastest supercomputer in the world after Frontier (OLCF-5), Fugaku, LUMI, and Leonardo, with Frontier being the fastest. It held the number 1 position from November 2018 to June 2020. Its current LINPACK benchmark is clocked at 148.6 petaFLOPS.
Hewlett Packard Enterprise Frontier, or OLCF-5, is the world's first exascale supercomputer. It is hosted at the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility (OLCF) in Tennessee, United States and became operational in 2022. As of December 2023, Frontier is the world's fastest supercomputer. It is based on the Cray EX and is the successor to Summit (OLCF-4). Frontier achieved an Rmax of 1.102 exaFLOPS, which is 1.102 quintillion floating-point operations per second, using AMD CPUs and GPUs.
Fugaku(Japanese: 富岳) is a petascale supercomputer at the Riken Center for Computational Science in Kobe, Japan. It started development in 2014 as the successor to the K computer and made its debut in 2020. It is named after an alternative name for Mount Fuji.
Aurora is an exascale supercomputer that was sponsored by the United States Department of Energy (DOE) and designed by Intel and Cray for the Argonne National Laboratory. It has been the second fastest supercomputer in the world since 2023. It is expected that after optimizing its performance it will exceed 2 ExaFLOPS, making it the fastest computer ever.
Zettascale computing refers to computing systems capable of calculating at least "1021 IEEE 754 Double Precision (64-bit) operations (multiplications and/or additions) per second (zettaFLOPS)". It is a measure of supercomputer performance, and as of July 2022 is a hypothetical performance barrier. A zettascale computer system could generate more single floating point data in one second than was stored by the total digital means on Earth in the first quarter of 2011.
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