EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks has delivered a storage networking system to the Department of Energy's Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, enabling the U.S. national lab to build the next-generation scientific simulation environment for its BlueGene/L massively-parallel computer. The BlueGene/L massively-parallel computer has already supplanted Japan's Earth Simulator machine, the world's former fastest computer, and has brought the lead in world class computing back to the United States. BlueGene/L, when fully assembled at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, will scale to 360 teraFLOP/s peak: nine times larger than the Earth Simulator. More importantly, the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration laboratories will use BlueGene/L for solving a wide range of scientific problems of interest to the Stockpile Stewardship Program, including: molecular modeling; quantum molecular dynamics; the dynamics of turbulent fluid flow and material modeling. "The deployment of BlueGene/L into Lawrence Livermore's scalable scientific simulation environment requires a commensurate quantum jump in IO performance, scalability and reliability. Our mission drivers require a storage architecture that enables an extremely cost-effective, scalable, and balanced I/O architecture that can be quickly and reliably deployed and operated while reducing complexity," said Mark Seager, Asst. Dept. Head for Advanced Technology at Livermore. "We need a solution which is optimized for the unrelenting demands of scientific computing at the BlueGene/L scale." "DataDirect is extremely proud to be part of the engineering effort that has brought the lead in high performance computing back to the United States," said Alex Bouzari, DataDirect's CEO and co-founder. "With eight DataDirect S2A storage systems in the top 20 of the TOP500 ® supercomputer sites, which is more than any other company in the world, we are extending our leadership position and continuing to provide Lawrence Livermore and other premier high performance computing centers with significant benefits in performance, scalability and cost effectiveness," he added. Also supported by DataDirect storage is Lawrence Livermore's unclassified simulation environment, which goes beyond BlueGene/L and includes two generations of the world's fastest Linux clusters: Thunder at 23 teraFLOP/s, MCR (at 11.1 teraFLOP/s) and ALC (at 9.6 teraFLOP/s). This massive, world- class simulation environment is powered by more than one hundred of DataDirect's S2A storage controllers closely coupled with the Lustre file system, and served by over 1.25 petaBytes of aggregate DataDirect storage capacity. Once BlueGene/L is fully assembled, DataDirect will be delivering a sustained parallel I/O aggregate Write bandwidth of 112.5 GigaBytes/s to Livermore's scientific applications! "The combination of our Lustre file system and the DataDirect Silicon Storage Appliances are a breakthrough combination that is presently the best storage solution for scientific computing at this scale" said Dr. Peter J. Braam, founder and CTO of Cluster File Systems Inc. "We are proud to provide and support critical enabling technology for the machine that propels the United States back into the worldwide high-performance lead." DataDirect Networks' Fibre Channel and SATA S2A are the world's highest performance storage systems, as well as the world's most cost efficient solutions for High Performance Computing and Rich Media applications. The S2A architecture is capable of delivering up to 1.5 GBytes/sec of raw sustained 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 a computer cluster implementation. In use in three of the five top clusters, and eight of the top twenty as listed in the Top500 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.