ACADEMIA

Panasas, Inc., today announced that Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) deployed the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster to meet the performance, bandwidth and rapid deployment requirements for LBNL's Geophys Cluster. The LBNL team installed the 256-node, production-ready Linux cluster, including full integration of the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster, in only six days. The system is being used to help solve large-scale geophysical problems in computational seismology and electromagnetic imaging. LBNL conducts research across a wide range of scientific disciplines, with key efforts in fundamental studies of the universe; quantitative biology; nanoscience; new energy systems and environmental solutions. The results of high-performance computing research at LBNL have ranged from lowering operational costs in oil and gas exploration to better forecasting earthquake and volcanic activity. The Panasas storage solution provides scalable bandwidth and accelerated throughput to enable LBNL's Geophys Cluster to operate at peak performance in processing very large volumes of critical data on subsurface activities. "We chose Panasas because they provide a reliable, turnkey high-performance file system that meets the speed and performance requirements for our new 1.8 teraflop cluster," said Gary Jung, project manager for Berkeley Lab's Scientific Cluster Support program. "The Panasas Storage Cluster insures that scientists are able to run their parallel, I/O intensive applications quickly and to completion." The Panasas Storage Cluster provides customers with an order of magnitude increase in performance, scalability and reliability. The integrated hardware/software solution combines a parallel file system with object storage technology, allowing seamless integration into new or existing HPC infrastructures. The Panasas storage solution delivers scalable capacity and bandwidth within a single global namespace, and additional storage shelves can be added to meet both existing and future storage performance requirements. This enables customers to fully maximize IT investments and reduce the overall total cost of ownership of their HPC infrastructure. "Since our founding, Panasas' success in helping government labs meet their high-performance storage demands speaks for itself," said Larry Jones, vice president of marketing at Panasas. "Customers such as LBNL are pushing the envelope of possibilities in Linux cluster computing, enabling a new generation of simulation-based science and research powered by Panasas storage solutions."