EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks delivers High Performance Storage Cluster Solution to US Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center – ranked in Top 15 of the world’s fastest supercomputers: DataDirect Networks announced that it has shipped 4 of its latest 7th generation S2A9500 Series high performance storage cluster solutions, totaling 260 TB, to the US Army Research Laboratory Major Shared Resource Center (ARL MSRC) as part of the US Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP) Technology Insertion 2006 (TI-06) initiative. As part of the HPCMP program, ARL MSRC provides supercomputer services, high-speed network communications, and computational science expertise that enable U.S. Defense laboratories to conduct a wide range of focused research, development, and test activities. The S2A9500 storage cluster solution is an integral component of ARL MSRC’s supercomputing services capable of supporting 50 trillion floating-point operations (teraflops/TFLOPS) and 21.5 TFLOPS supercomputers with 10 GB/s throughput from just 4 systems. The S2A9500 is able to deliver high sustained I/O performance to ARL MSRC’s 1,024 and 842 node supercomputers, thereby reducing processing times and accelerating job completion for these national security related research, development and test activities. Further, with the S2A technology, the S2A9500 system delivers this performance and capacity to multiple applications in a non-proprietary solution with open solution support for a variety of file systems. “ARL MSRC’s supercomputing system supports a variety of applications and the ability to deliver optimized I/O performance to reduce processing time to all these applications in a non-proprietary solution was very important to us,” said Tom Kendall, chief engineer, ARL MSRC. “The S2A9500 with its tremendous scalability, open system support and ability to deliver parallel I/O, helps enable a variety of ARL MSRC supercomputing applications as well as provide storage flexibility for our national security mission.” The S2A9500 solution will be attached to the US Army Research Laboratory's Major Shared Resource Center’s two most powerful supercomputers which are expected to be ranked in the top 15 of the world's most powerful supercomputer systems. These supercomputers will increase the Center’s computational capability by 70 TFLOPS. The supercomputing procurement increases the Center's computing capability from 30 TFLOPS to over 100 TFLOPS, making it one of the largest computing centers in the US Department of Defense. The most powerful ARL MSRC supercomputer incorporates 1,024-nodes with 4,096 dual socket dual-core Intel Woodcrest 3.0 GHz processors. The system will also have 112 more 3.0 GHz cores (28 nodes) for log-in, storage and administration, with 8.5 TB (8,500 GB) of memory and 260 TB of raw disk space, all supported by 4 DataDirect S2A9500s. All nodes will communicate via a 4X DDR (20 Gb/s) InfiniBand network with 10 Gigabit Ethernet uplink capability. The second system is an 842-compute node supercomputer comprising of 3,368 3.2 GHz Intel Dempsey cores. This system will increase ARL MSRC’s computational capability by more than 21.5 TFLOPS. The system will also have 96 3.73 GHz cores (24 nodes) for login, storage, and administration and will have 7.1 TB of memory. This system will also be supported by the 4 DataDirect S2A9500s, totaling 260 TB of disk capacity. These nodes will also communicate via a 4X DDR InfiniBand network with 10 GigE uplink capability. The DataDirect S2A9500 is based on its Silicon Storage Appliance (S2A) technology, a 7th generation RAID storage networking system, which delivers up to 3 GB/s and support up to 840 TBs. The system supports Fibre Channel-4 (4 Gb/s) and InfiniBand-4X (10 Gb/s) host connectivity simultaneously, 1,120 Fibre Channel or SATA disks and works with a wide range of shared and parallel file systems. The S2A9500 can deliver 720 TB in two racks, offering the highest performance and most dense solution with the smallest footprint in the industry. Further, the S2A provides enterprise-class data protection and reliability with multiple levels of redundancy, incorporating on-the-fly parity checking of all read I/Os and Hardware RAID 6 with no loss of performance across a broad range of computational, visualization, and nearline environments. DataDirect Networks’ S2A offers broad infrastructure support powering compute clusters from IBM, Dell, HP, Cray, SGI, Bull and others. "We are very pleased to have been selected to be a part of the groundbreaking ARL MSRC program,” added Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. “Our leadership role as the largest supplier of high performance storage to more than half of the world’s top 100 supercomputing sites, enabling 5 out of the top 6 fastest computers in the world, coupled with the overwhelming market acceptance of our S2A storage technology from programs like the TI-06 initiative, validates our decade long commitment to providing the best-in-class scalable storage solutions for high performance computing environments.”