ACADEMIA

Supercomputing Leader Leverages Clustered Storage to Create Breakthroughs in Scientific Imaging and Visualization: Isilon Systems, the leader in clustered storage, today announced that the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC), is using Isilon IQ in a project to power new breakthroughs in scientific visualization and analytics applications, enabling University of California San Diego Cancer Center scientists to gain deeper insights into their research while accelerating the discovery process. SDSC, which resides within the top ten percent of the TOP500, is a world leader in using, innovating and providing information technology to enable advances and new discovery in science and engineering across the academia, industry and the scientific community. "Today, the line between real world applicability and scientific theory continues to fade as technological advancements and scientific knowledge unite to take scientific insight beyond the laboratory and into much broader arenas of comprehension and analysis," said Dr. Steve Cutchin, Manager, Visualization Services, SDSC. "SDSC provides cutting-edge technology and expertise to extend the reach of science and continue to advance scientific accomplishments, and Isilon clustered storage forms part of a web-based, Cellular Imaging Portal for cancer scientists." In the project, SDSC deployed Isilon IQ clustered storage to support its Visualization Services Group's creation and management of a web-based, Cellular Imaging Portal. In partnership with the University of California San Diego Moores Cancer Center, SDSC developed an advanced collaboration service relying on Isilon IQ, enabling Cancer Center scientists to upload microscopic cellular images onto the portal, which then ran a series of automated visualizations and models of the cellular images, saving both the original images and the new animations directly onto the Isilon cluster for reliable, 24x7 access and analysis. With traditional storage systems, this critical visualization process was hindered by complexity and disparate data silos, as well as performance bottlenecks preventing high-performance access to large file-based images. SDSC used Isilon IQ to unify all of the cellular imaging data into one, single, easy to manage, shared volume of data, enabling the Cancer Center's researchers to maximize SDSC's innovative visualization applications to broaden their knowledgebase and better communicate their scientific discoveries. "As technology and scientific knowledge continue to advance in parallel, research is moving out of the Petri dish and into the datacenter," said Brett Goodwin, VP of Marketing & Business Development, Isilon Systems. "Isilon IQ was designed specifically for high performance applications involving large, file-based data and SDSC's use of clustered storage to take cellular imaging to the next level demonstrates the transformative effects of this powerful technology for high performance spanning research and the enterprise market." Isilon IQ delivers the industry's first single file system that unifies and provides instant and ubiquitous access to the rapidly growing stores of digital content and unstructured data, eliminating the cost and complexity barriers of traditional storage architectures. OneFS 4.5 is a unified operating system software layer that powers all of Isilon's award-winning IQ family of clustered storage systems including the Isilon IQ 1920, 3000, 6000, Accelerator, and EX 6000, which are available immediately.