ENTERTAINMENT

SAN JOSE, CA -- BlueArc Corporation, provider of high performance enterprise-class network storage systems, announced that it has shipped five BlueArc Si7500 Storage Systems to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) to be used in conjunction with LLNL's Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). The BlueArc Si7500 Storage Systems will be used with LLNL's high-powered computing simulations. LLNL looked at solutions from the industry's largest players and chose BlueArc's Si7500 Storage Systems because they offered the bonus of remarkable data access time--three to five times faster--with comparable reliability, leading to a lower cost of ownership. "BlueArc has solved exactly the right problems in storage," said Mark Seager, Assistant Department Head for Terascale Systems at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. "Lawrence Livermore's computing environments demand and get the latest and best solutions available. Where others couldn't deliver, BlueArc provided at least three to five times the performance of any competing system and yet remained less costly. It was a very clear choice for us." Four of the five systems shipped to LLNL have a combined storage capacity of seven terabytes, and will be used as a central part of two Linux clusters with a total of 216 nodes and with 432 Pentium 4 processors with a peak of 1.5 teraFLOP/s. The four systems will provide LLNL's high-powered computer simulations with a global file system for LLNL's Parallel Capacity Resource (PCR). The first simulation or "science run" planned with Si7500 will be a "National Ignition Facility (NIF) laser beam" - modelling one of the 192 NIF laser beam transport from creation to impingement on a NIF deuterium target. There are many stages in this simulation: beam amplification, calibration, reflection and focusing. The results of these simulations will give NIF scientists a better understanding of beam quality at the target. The BlueArc Storage Systems will be used to periodically store and checkpoint progress made on computer simulations that run, in certain cases, for weeks or months. In the event of a computational system failure or interruption, the simulation can be restarted from the last checkpoint, avoiding the costly and time-consuming event of "starting over from scratch." In addition, LLNL scientists will visualize the results of the calculation while it progresses, determining progress and understanding of the simulation as it advances. The fifth BlueArc Si7500 Storage System includes four terabytes of storage capacity to be used to support LLNL's center-wide high performance NFS services, specifically LLNL's /nfs/tmp directories: where delivered performance from hundreds of clients simultaneously writing is a mission-critical resource. This system will be touched by virtually every computer on the campus for temporary storage of large simulation data sets. "We could not have asked for a better industry validation for BlueArc technology and support," said Enrico Pesatori, CEO of BlueArc. "The Lawrence Livermore win points out that system performance is crucial. BlueArc's performance is unmatched yet it also lowers total costs, creating a winning solution for any type of business." For more information visit www.bluearc.com