Cluster Computing:

WESTINGHOUSE SELECTS PolyServe NAS CLUSTER SOLUTION

Westinghouse's Nuclear Fuel Business has selected the PolyServe NAS Cluster solution to enable a high-performance, fault-tolerant and cost-effective Linux file-serving cluster, PolyServe, Inc. announced. Westinghouse Electric Sweden, which has been running the PolyServe NAS Cluster in production for more than 10 months, uses the solution to support core analysis and reactor safety calculations crucial to the business of Westinghouse in the market of boiling water reactors.

"Due to the heavy I/O demands of our applications, traditional network- attached storage (NAS) appliances were not a viable option," said Hans Bostrom, manager of software development, Fuel Engineering Vasteras, for Westinghouse. "The PolyServe NAS Cluster software enabled us to smoothly migrate from our previous UNIX platform to low-cost Linux servers, and it ensures our cluster is always available, provides the high-performance I/O throughput our computational applications demand and simplifies administration."

The Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel Business is the world's leading integrated supplier of nuclear fuel products and services. The business unit manufactures fuel-related products and components for nuclear power plants worldwide. The PolyServe NAS Cluster supports the file-serving needs of approximately 100 users across Westinghouse Fuel and Service in the U.S. and Sweden. Users are performing user interface work and compute-intensive calculations in a number of different technical areas, such as structural analysis, nuclear physics, thermal hydraulics and mechanics, to support the business of Westinghouse Nuclear Fuel and Service in the boiling water reactor market. The amount of processing places a heavy demand on file-serving performance of the Westinghouse cluster.

"Westinghouse is a prime example of how PolyServe is redefining the price and performance standards in the NAS market," said Mike Stankey, president and CEO of PolyServe. "We're pleased Westinghouse has met its throughput and reliability requirements with the PolyServe NAS Cluster and achieved major cost savings versus NAS appliance and UNIX server cluster alternatives."

The PolyServe NAS Cluster solution integrates Network File System (NFS) protocol functionality with a true symmetric cluster file system (CFS), high- availability services and cluster and storage management capabilities. The product aggregates up to 16 low-cost Linux- and Intel Architecture-based servers for high-performance, fault-tolerant file serving across a storage area network (SAN). Shared data and management capabilities ease IT administration by enabling servers and storage to be managed as one.

Westinghouse has deployed a cluster of five 3 GHz dual-processor file servers with 4 GB of memory each, running PolyServe NAS Cluster software for Linux. The cluster exports file systems via NFS to 13 calculation nodes and three login nodes supporting user requests for variety of I/O- and memory- intensive calculations.

"We decided to move to a cluster of Intel Xeon- and Itanium-based Linux- servers, which was by far the least expensive hardware alternative available," said Bostrom. "The PolyServe NAS solution enabled a smooth transition from our previous UNIX cluster, which was very stable, to an equally stable Linux cluster. And with the PolyServe CFS, we're able to easily add or swap out hardware and software without taking down the cluster -- a critical requirement for our business, which needs the cluster available at all times."