EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks, the market leader in high performance storage, announced that it has joined the OpenIB consortium. In addition, Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect, has been appointed to the Board of Directors of the group. The OpenIB Alliance is dedicated to delivering a single open source Linux software stack for deployment of the InfiniBand architecture. Equally adept at carrying file, messaging, and storage protocols, Infiniband technology is emerging as a major driver of high-performance clustered computing. Infiniband provides a technology leap over traditional interconnects in both bandwidth and inter-computer messaging capabilities at compelling price/performance levels. “The DataDirect Networks’ S2A family has delivered the highest bandwidth and scalability of any commercially available storage system for the last five years running; the November 2004 announcement of the groundbreaking S2A9500 with support for native Infiniband connectivity has extended that performance advantage.” said Brad Winett, VP of Marketing and Business Development for DataDirect. “The OpenIB Consortium’s goals of standardizing and extending the Infiniband specification is a necessary and logical step to ensure its widespread adoption.” said Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. “The market timing, compelling throughput and low latency performance, and cost/benefit advantages of Infiniband networking is perfectly suited to our highperformance customers. Only DataDirect’s S2A systems can fully take advantage and leverage the benefits inherent to the Infiniband interface, so it is a natural fit for DataDirect to take a leadership role in developing this exciting technology for the benefit of the entire highperformance computing community”. Powering the World’s fastest supercomputer at Lawrence Livermore National Labs and 13 of the World’s 50 fastest supercomputers, DataDirect Networks has major installations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, NCSA, NOAA, NASA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and many others.