It’s not surprising when one discusses “High Performance Computing” that the focus tends to fall on the “computing” aspects (algorithms, computational capability). However, when HPC is applied to seismic imaging it’s important to realize that computing can’t happen without data and the storage subsystem. ExxonMobil HPC has been operating multi-petabyte file systems for over five years and has developed various practices for managing data at this scale. In this talk we plan to discuss the processes used to manage a petascale storage facility consisting of >500M files and the best practices. We will also describe a tool that allows us to effectively move data across file systems when disks need to be balanced or upgraded.
