Peter Braam

Last updated
Peter Braam
Born
Peter J. Braam
Alma mater
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.braam.io

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.

Contents

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.

Early life and education

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]

Career and research

1980–1997 education, mathematics

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.

1997–2012 computing startups and acquisitions

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]

2013–present scientific and computing consultant

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]

Philanthropic activities

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]

Awards and recognition

Selected publications

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputer</span> Type of extremely powerful computer

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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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edinburgh Parallel Computing Centre</span> Supercomputing centre at the University of Edinburgh

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">TOP500</span> Database project devoted to the ranking of computers

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Computational Infrastructure</span> HPC facility in Canberra, Australia

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.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">K computer</span> Supercomputer in Kobe, Japan

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Supercomputing in Europe</span> Overview of supercomputing in Europe

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Summit (supercomputer)</span> Supercomputer developed by IBM

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.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frontier (supercomputer)</span> American supercomputer

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fugaku (supercomputer)</span> Japanese supercomputer

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References

  1. ↑ Braam, Peter J. (1987). Magnetic Monopoles and Hyperbolic Three-manifolds. University of Oxford. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  2. 1 2 "Braam Bequest to enable the use of research to improve countless lives". www.merton.ox.ac.uk. February 21, 2018. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  3. ↑ "Peter Braam Career".[ permanent dead link ]
  4. 1 2 "Peter Braam – The Mathematics Genealogy Project". www.genealogy.math.ndsu.nodak.edu. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  5. ↑ Hitchin, Nigel J. "Mathematics and culture: Geometry in Oxford 1960–1990". Celebratio Mathematica . Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  6. ↑ "The Coda Distributed File System". Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  7. ↑ "Using the InterMezzo Distributed Filesystem – Getting Connected in a Disconnected World". LinuxPlanet. August 12, 2002. Archived from the original on March 24, 2016. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  8. ↑ "Peter Braam: The Intermezzo FileSystem". Carnegie Mellon University. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  9. ↑ Braam, Peter (2005). "The Lustre Storage Architecture". arXiv: 1903.01955 [cs.OS].
  10. ↑ Feldman, Michael (June 14, 2017). "Lustre Architect Peter Braam Talks About His Latest Venture | TOP500 Supercomputer Sites". www.top500.org. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  11. ↑ Rosenberg, Dave (July 28, 2010). "Open-source Lustre gets supercomputing nod". CNET. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  12. ↑ Brian Behlendorf. "ZFS on Linux for Lustre" (PDF). Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 31, 2014.
  13. ↑ "Cray Moves to Acquire the Seagate ClusterStor Line". July 28, 2017. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  14. ↑ Smolaks, Max (June 27, 2018). "DDN is buying Intel's Lustre file system business" . Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  15. ↑ "Sun To Buy Lustre File System For Solaris, Linux". InformationWeek. August 12, 2007. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  16. ↑ Hemsoth, Nicole (February 21, 2013). "Xyratex Captures Oracle's Lustre" . Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  17. ↑ "Sun Microsystems Expands High Performance Computing Portfolio with Definitive Agreement to Acquire Assets of Cluster File Systems, Including the Lustre File System". Sun Microsystems. September 12, 2007. Archived from the original on October 2, 2007. Retrieved September 23, 2013.
  18. ↑ Brueckner, Rich (November 9, 2010). "Bojanic & Braam Getting Lustre Band Back Together at Xyratex". insideHPC. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  19. ↑ Fragalla, John (2014). "Improving Lustre® OST Performance with ClusterStor GridRAID" (PDF). hpcadvisorycouncil.org.
  20. ↑ Braam, Peter (March 3, 2015). "Exascale File Systems" (PDF).
  21. ↑ Danilov, Nikita (Fall 2016). "Mero: Co-Designing an Object Store for Extreme Scale". PDSW.
  22. ↑ McLelland, Meghan (2013). "EIOW: Exa-scale I/O workgroup" (PDF). opensfs.org.
  23. ↑ Braam, Peter (2012). "The Exa-scale I/O initiative – EIOW, Xyratex white paper" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2012-12-22. Retrieved 2019-03-19.
  24. ↑ "Making the case for reforming the I/O software stack of extreme-scale systems". ResearchGate. Retrieved March 2, 2019.
  25. ↑ "High-Performance Computing (HPC)". Horizon 2020 - European Commission. April 2, 2014. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  26. ↑ Moyake, Nox. "Multidisciplinary innovator Peter Braam to guest lecture at CHPC". CHPC. Archived from the original on May 13, 2021. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  27. ↑ Braam, Peter J (April 9, 2018). "Performance Engineering for the SKA Telescope". ICPE'18 : proceedings of the 2018 ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering. Berlin, Germany. ISBN   978-1-4503-5095-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  28. ↑ "The IADS Colloquium – 'Data Processing for the SKA Telescope' with multidisciplinary innovator Dr Peter Braam". Institute of Applied Data Science. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  29. ↑ Brueckner, Rich (February 4, 2019). "Video: TensorFlow for HPC?". insideHPC.
  30. ↑ "Establishing a visionary programme to improve human wellbeing". Oxford Thinking. Retrieved March 19, 2019.[ permanent dead link ]
  31. ↑ "Bequest to enable major new programme of research focusing on human wellbeing – Oxford Thinking – University of Oxford". www.campaign.ox.ac.uk. April 20, 2018. Retrieved March 19, 2019.
  32. ↑ Brown, Vicki (September 1, 1999). "A report from the Open Source Convention" . Retrieved 16 March 2019.
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