EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks, the market leader in high performance storage announced today that it has been awarded the contract by Bull to provide the storage for the French CEA Atomic Energy Commission (Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique). DataDirect Network's recently introduced S2A9500, the world's fastest Fibre Channel-4 storage system, will connect to a cluster of Bull NovaScale SMP servers and power "Tera10," the number one supercomputer in Europe and one of the fastest supercomputers worldwide. Geared to be fully deployed by the end of 2005, DataDirect's cluster of S2A9500 storage systems will provide a storage pool of more than 1 Million Gigabytes of disk storage (1 Petabyte). The DataDirect S2A9500 storage systems ground-breaking bandwidth capabilities will be utilized to create full point-in-time copies of the supercomputer's 27 Terabyte of main system memory in under five minutes, sustaining in excess of 100,000 Megabytes per second of both read and write bandwidth through the Lustre global parallel file system by Cluster File Systems Inc. and Quadrics interconnect, running on Tera10. This incredible performance will drive unmatched operating efficiencies within the supercomputing cluster allowing more breakthrough science to be accomplished in less time and at a lower cost. "DataDirect Networks' S2A technology has proven itself to be the ideal storage solution for our groundbreaking Tera10 system. For a system of this magnitude CEA needed a proven storage vendor that could deliver storage and bandwidth on a massive scale," said Jean Gonnord, Tera10 Project Director at CEA. "We are extremely pleased that the combination of DataDirect and Bull has provided us with such an elegant solution for our next-generation computing infrastructure." Jointly benchmarked and rigorously tested by the DataDirect and Bull team, the combination of DataDirect's S2A9500 and Bull's NovaScale SMP servers provided CEA with the highestperformance and most scalable architecture possible, also delivering higher reliability, easier manageability, and better cost of ownership for CEA. "DataDirect is very proud to have been selected to provide CEA, one of the World's most advanced and visionary supercomputing facilities, with our state of the art Fibre Channel-4 S2A9500 systems," said Alex Bouzari, DataDirect's CEO and co-founder. "With CEA's Tera10, we continue to demonstrate our position as the world's leading provider of high-performance computing storage, adding true value and enhancing our partners' CPU and cluster implementations as well as our customers' networks and computing environments," he added. Jean-Francois Lavignon, Bull HPC manager said: "We are very pleased with DataDirect's S2A storage technology which is ideally matched in performance and scale to our NovaScale SMP servers and has already helped us achieve the highest performance ever on a single server through the Lustre file system. The DataDirect S2A9500 is the perfect storage complement for our customers, providing the best technical and cost-effective solutions available for HPC computing." 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.