AUSTIN, Texas, Nov. 19 /PRNewswire/ -- SC08 -- DataDirect Networks, Inc.
(DDN) the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest
performance computing environments in the world, today announced that NASA has
selected its flagship S2A9900 storage platforms to provide the data backbone
for Pleiades, the space agency's new supercomputer. The goal of the Pleiades
project -- named after the open star cluster of the same name -- is to develop
an extremely powerful modeling and simulation environment of unprecedented
speed and capacity to support research and engineering within each of NASA's
four mission directorates. The Pleiades project is located at the NASA
Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the NASA Ames Research Center in
Moffett Field, California.
"We have some of the biggest systems in the world, and with Pleiades being
the largest InfiniBand cluster, we needed the I/O capabilities of the storage
to scale equivalently to support our computational and simulation
environments," said Alan Powers, HPC Technical Director, Computer Sciences
Corporation (CSC), a global leader in providing technology-enabled solutions
and services. "We chose DDN because of its performance, scalability, and data
integrity capabilities, and the company has been a trusted partner for
deploying our I/O solutions for several other projects."
Pleiades is a 51,200-core SGI(R) Altix(R) ICE+ system, leveraging six DDN
S2A9900 high performance storage platforms and a Lustre(R) file system. The
system scales easily, both in capacity and performance as NASA's requirements
evolve. Ranked today as the third fastest supercomputer in the world,
according to the latest Top500 listing, Pleiades will be capable of generating
609 trillion calculations per second of peak performance.
"DDN has had a long and successful history of working with NASA; in fact,
NASA was the very first customer of our Silicon Storage Architecture(TM)
platforms," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DDN. "This is a great
example of how our solutions are designed to meet the needs of the most
extreme environments in the world, as the Pleiades project is pushing the
boundaries of scientific discovery as NASA furthers its exploration, science,
space and aeronautic research to improve our quality-of-life. We congratulate
NASA on the continued success of its strategic research initiatives."
Pleiades is DDN's fifth project with NASA, having successfully delivered
on Columbia, Schirra, RTJones, and Hyperwall-2, the world's largest known
visualization system.
With over 160 petabytes installed worldwide, DDN S2A solutions deliver
more aggregate bandwidth to the Top500 Supercomputers than any other IT
vendor, including seven 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
