ACADEMIA

DataDirect Networks announced that the University of South Florida (USF) has deployed DDN storage technology to power advanced research across the University.

USF depends on the performance, density, and reliability of DDN's modular storage platform and the Lustre™-based ExaScaler™ parallel file system solution as the foundation of its centralized research computing storage strategy, which helps USF rank ninth among universities worldwide in the number of U.S. patents it generates. As part of this project, DDN and USF architected a system which can scale to petabyte proportions and easily increase performance beyond 100GB/s to support future University research ambitions.

"DDN's leadership position in massively scalable storage technology is complemented by the significant parallel file system expertise we have developed over a decade," said John Josephakis, Senior Vice President of Sales, High Performance Computing and Life Sciences, DDN. "For more than 14 years, DDN has specialized in engineering highly-optimized systems for the requirements of data-intensive environments like the University of South Florida, and we are pleased to help them achieve nationally recognized insight with our technology."

With this new resource, the USF can accelerate their computational simulation in a number of data-intensive disciplines ranging from physics analysis, molecular simulations, fluid dynamics and weather modeling from more than 40 research groups within the University.

"DDN's reputation for technology and quality preceded the company, in deploying this new resource we were also pleased by the system's low total cost of ownership at scale," said Dan Majchrzak, University of South Florida Director of Research Computing. "DDN's technology and the deep Lustre expertise of its staff are important assets for our high performance computing (HPC) team and the University's scientific agenda."

Moving forward, USF will rely on its DDN system to help support a data visualization center that includes an 18-megapixel ultra-high resolution video wall for viewing 3-D graphics and images that visually represent massive data sets.

In 2011, DDN was confirmed as the market leader in HPC in a research report titled "HPC User Site Census: Storage" by Intersect360 Research, in which DDN technology was named as the most commonly deployed data storage technology by HPC customers.