EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks has supplied Ohio Supercomputer Center with a highly scalable 40 Terabyte SwiftCluster system providing in excess of 1 Gigabyte/second of sustained NAS file services for an advanced query-based visualization demonstration at the Supercomputing 2004 Conference. DataDirect's SwiftCluster storage system combines in a single rack the company's award winning block level S2A8500 storage controller with 40 Terabytes of SATA disk drives. This highly efficient SAN/NAS Convergence storage system is part of the StorCloud environment at SC2004, and delivers tremendous file-level performance through an extremely simple and elegant system architecture. Proving once again the ability of DataDirect's S2A to tie together open, off-the-shelf computing components, the creation of the shared NAS storage environment provided performance that cannot be matched by any proprietary offering. The DataDirect system serves a compute cluster that allows high-speed access to massive datasets for visualization purposes. Data from biomedical imagery and data generated from large scale oil reservoir optimization problems are used for the demonstration. Data analysis and visualization requests involve associative queries into and processing of large volumes of data. The analysis results will be visualized on a workstation. DataDirect's high file-level performance via disk and host parallelism will enable the data querying and manipulation software, developed by researchers at the OSU Biomedical Informatics Department and OSC, to access the data at very high speeds, providing the researchers the ability to analyze data faster and more efficiently. "We had the 40 Terabyte DataDirect SwiftCluster with its S2A8500 system up and running in about a day," said Keith Stewart, Systems Developer and Engineer at the Ohio Supercomputer Center, adding "Deploying such a massive system at such high performance in so little time is very impressive." Tahsin Kurc of the Biomedical Informatics Department said "the ability of the S2A to consolidate all of our data assets in one system allowed us to easily load our huge amount of data for immediate data analysis and visualization." "We are proud to be partnering with Ohio Supercomputer Center, one of the premier HPC sites in the world, for this technology-advancing demonstration that once again proves that DataDirect's unique parallel processing technology delivers incredible performance and architectural simplicity in highly scalable NAS environments," said John Josephakis, Vice President of HPC Sales for DataDirect Networks. "The SwiftCluster storage system is ideal for any customer who needs high performance, highly scalable file system services with superb reliability and cost effectiveness," he added DataDirect Networks' Fibre Channel and SATA S2A are the world's highest performance storage systems, as well as the most cost efficient solutions for High Performance Computing and Rich Media applications. The current S2A architecture is capable of delivering up to 1.5 GBytes/sec of sustained host throughput in reads or writes from a single target via advanced disk and host parallelism, and hundreds of Gigabytes per second of aggregate performance in computer cluster implementations. In use in three of the five top clusters, and eight of the top twenty as listed in the Top500(TM) Supercomputer Sites, DataDirect has major installations at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, NCSA, NOAA, NASA, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Argonne National Laboratory, and many others. Background: DataDirect Networks is the world's leading provider of networked storage and clusters for HPC and Rich Media. Providing SAN, SAN/NAS convergence, and cluster solutions for Government, Research Labs, Defense, Life sciences, Broadcasting, Digital Production, Oil and Gas industries. For more information, contact DataDirect Networks at (818) 700-7600 or visit www.datadirectnet.com .