AUSTIN, Tex., Nov. 17 /PRNewswire/ -- SC08 -- DataDirect Networks, Inc.
(DDN) the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest
performance computing environments in the world, today announced that it has
been selected by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) to deliver one of
the world's largest and fastest file systems. Codenamed "Spider," the system
is designed to deliver up to 240 gigabytes per second of single Lustre(R) file
system performance and support multiple supercomputers as the underlying
site-wide storage system for computational science. Spider is roughly twice
as fast as the previous performance leader and stores over 10 petabytes of
research data, equivalent to 1,000 copies of the printed contents in the U.S.
Library of Congress.
Spider will also be servicing the I/O requirements of Jaguar-ORNL's new
supercomputer-capable of delivering over 1,000 trillion calculations per
second, or one petaflop. Jaguar is the first petaflop system to be delivered
by Cray.
"We selected DDN after extensive internal testing," said Galen Shipman,
Group Leader, Technology Integration, ORNL. "We are excited to be working with
Cray and DDN on this project. Spider will provide a center-wide accessible
storage system to the Leadership Computing Facility (LCF), therefore greatly
enhancing our capability to deliver scientific insight."
The Spider system is unique in many ways; it is the world's fastest and
largest POSIX-compliant file system and was built to support the I/O
requirements of over 180,000 CPU computation cores. In addition, it is:
-- Made up of 48 DDN S2A9900 high performance storage platforms;
- Each S2A9900 is configured with 280 one terabyte hard disk drives
- Occupies 30 data center racks-each S2A9900 is only 24U and features
DDN's ultra high-density 4U, 60-bay disk drive enclosures
-- Configured with 13,440 one terabyte hard disk drives
- 13,440 terabytes of unformatted capacity
- 10,752 terabytes of formatted, usable capacity
-- Connects with 192 Lustre storage servers into a single file system
namespace
"We are honored to be selected by Oak Ridge for this monumental project,"
said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DDN. "It is quite amazing to think that
only three years ago DDN was celebrating a performance milestone by delivering
130 gigabytes per second of bandwidth, and now has been selected to nearly
double this level of performance, breaking our record in the process. Being
selected by ORNL validates the HPC focus and engineering design philosophy we
have been building upon for over 10 years. It is extremely rewarding to see
our solutions in action in one of the first petascale systems and we
congratulate Oak Ridge on their continued success."
The selection of an independent storage system is a strategic initiative
for ORNL. The Spider storage environment is de-coupled from the purchase and
operation of ORNL computational systems, enabling it to be accessible during
single supercomputer maintenance windows and allows the storage environment to
evolve independently of the Lab's compute initiatives as a best-of-breed
research storage foundation.
"ORNL has been working with DDN for many years," said Buddy Bland, LCF
Project Director, ORNL. "Spider and Jaguar will enable breakthrough science at
unprecedented scale. For example, all of the climate modeling data that went
into the Nobel prize-winning climate report in 2008 would easily fit within
Spider, easing the burden of data transfers for the analysis of this data."
ORNL is a multi-program science and technology laboratory managed for the
U.S. Department of Energy by UT-Battelle, LLC. Scientists and engineers at
ORNL conduct basic and applied research and development to create scientific
knowledge and technological solutions that strengthen the nation's leadership
in key areas of science. DDN storage platforms will be used in ORNL's
computational science environment to improve the world. Some of these
initiatives include: exploring the science of neurodegenerative disorders to
help cure diseases like Parkinson's and Alzheimer's; understanding the impact
of climate change on every region of the globe; creating atomic-scale enzymes
which can accelerate the production of biofuels to reduce the nation's
dependency on foreign oil; and advancing the nation's understanding of 'dark
matter' which makes up most of the universe's mass.
With over 160 petabytes installed worldwide, DDN S2A solutions deliver
more aggregate bandwidth to the Top500 Supercomputers than any other IT
vendor, including six of the world's Top10, 28 of the Top 50 and 48 of the
Top100 fastest supercomputers.
About the S2A9900
As DDN's flagship eighth generation S2A platform, the industry-leading
S2A9900 provides extreme performance and capacity, with the ability to manage
1.2 petabytes in only two floor tiles and deliver sustained throughput of up
to 6 gigabytes per second for both writes and reads, per appliance.
The S2A9900 enables HPC sites to run multiple applications simultaneously
in parallel, whereas conventional, general purpose storage systems force them
to run applications sequentially, costing more time, more money and more
management personnel. Additionally, the S2A9900 is the only storage platform
that writes data as fast as it reads it, with guaranteed QoS, which translates
into consistently predictable performance for large content files-critical for
HPC environments.
For more information about DDN S2A platforms, visit:
http://www.datadirectnet.com/s2a-platform/s2a-platform
About DataDirect Networks
DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) is the data infrastructure provider for
the most extreme, content-intensive environments in the world-including the
largest online gaming and music sites, social networking applications
developers, photo and video sharing services, high performance computing
environments, and more than 400 broadcast and post-production facilities
around the globe. With more than 160 petabytes installed worldwide, the
company's S2A(TM) (Silicon Storage Architecture(TM)) technology delivers
massive throughput, scalable capacity, consistency, efficiency and data
integrity for today's extremely competitive and evolving markets. Founded in
1998, DDN serves customers through its global partnerships with Dell, IBM,
Sony and other industry leaders; and through its offices in Europe, India,
Asia Pacific, Japan and throughout the U.S. For more information, go to
www.datadirectnet.com or call +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298).
DataDirect Networks, S2A and Silicon Storage Architecture are trademarks
of DataDirect Networks, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their
respective owners.
Media Contacts:
DataDirect Networks
Kim Nelson
+1 (818) 336-2162
knelson@datadirectnet.com
Steve Zivanic
+ 1 (818) 675-2821
szivanic@datadirectnet.com
