EARTH SCIENCES

With more than 110 Gigabytes/Second of raw bandwidth, DataDirect’s S2A storage system will provide Cray and Sandia with the highest storage networking bandwidth in the world – After an extensive 14-month selection process, DataDirect Networks, the leading provider of networked storage and clusters solutions for High Performance Computing and Rich Media, became the recipient of Cray’s award for Sandia’s Red Storm storage system - one of the greatest supercomputing endeavors of this decade. Pursuant to the award, DataDirect will deliver a storage networking system based on its award winning S2A technology, capable of delivering peak aggregate block level bandwidth in excess of 110 gigabytes per second. Red Storm is expected to become operational in 2004 and provide at least seven times more computing power than Sandia’s current ASCI Red supercomputer. “The key to Red Storm’s superior performance on real-world applications will be system balance - every element of the system will be ultra-fast: processors, memory subsystem, I/O and, thanks for DataDirect’s S2A product, storage networking as well. This is in sharp contrast to the clusters available in the market today, whose fast processors are often slowed to a crawl by the other elements,” said Wayne Kugel, Red Storm operations executive at Cray. “DataDirect’s S2A storage networking system has the tremendous bandwidth needed to keep pace with the pioneering Red Storm supercomputer.” “This computer will allow modeling and simulation of complex problems that were only recently thought impractical, if not impossible,” said Tom Hunter, Sandia Senior Vice President for Nuclear Weapons Programs. “It is a major step toward establishing computing as the key enabler of science and engineering in the 21st century and reemphasizes our role as one of the world’s leaders in that transformation.” “We expect to get substantially more real work done, at a lower overall cost, on a highly balanced system like Red Storm than on a large-scale cluster,” said Sandia’s Bill Camp, Director of Computers, Computation, Information and Mathematics. "We are very excited about winning this significant contract and are eager to build and deliver the world’s fastest storage networking system," said Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. "With three of the world’s top six high performance computing sites and dozens of the fastest HPC systems getting significant performance, cost and scalability benefits from DataDirect’s storage and cluster solutions, we continue to provide the absolute best in networked storage technology to our valued customers." “High levels of scalability in both bandwidth and capacity combined with a cost effective architecture are fundamental design elements we have used in the S2A storage networking system,” said Dave Fellinger, DataDirect CTO. “The S2A has a high speed, low latency switched parallel front end fibre channel building block with superior write data capabilities. A wide, RAID enabled cache building block, combined with a very broad disk backend design ensures that data moves through the S2A at the highest speeds possible. The S2A has built in redundancy and system resiliency features throughout its architecture. It also offers powerful artificial intelligence, adaptive behavior and system monitoring and management capabilities, making it idealized for a large scale system implementation such as Red Storm,” he concluded Substantial DataDirect S2A HPC customers include: Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Sandia National Labs, NCSA, NASA Goddard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Argonne National Laboratory, US Army Research Lab, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, NCAR, and DKRZ Germany.