Panasas today announced it has been selected by Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) as the storage solution for its new Cielo petascale supercomputer. This implementation is intended to be the fastest computer in the world, and will be the second supercomputer used by LANL to leverage Panasas’ high-performance storage.  

"We are looking forward to working with Panasas to provide the data storage capability for Cielo essential for its success in support of national security," said John Morrison, high performance computing division leader at LANL. "This continues the work that Panasas has performed in providing Los Alamos National Laboratory with the backbone of its parallel data storage capability - including innovative technology in support of the LANL Roadrunner system and other computing platforms at LANL. The file system provided by Panasas for Cielo will support users at all three National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratories including Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories in their use of the system."

The selection of Panasas was made through a highly competitive procurement process that included a technical evaluation by members of the labs. Design, procurement and deployment were accomplished by the NNSA’s New Mexico Alliance for Computing at Extreme Scale. Cielo will be installed in third quarter of 2010, with additional capability planned for 2011.

“We consider LANL’s decision to purchase Panasas storage a validation of our unique architecture and ability to address the bandwidth challenges of the world’s fastest computers,” said Randy Strahan, CEO of Panasas. “We’re excited to be in on the ground floor of the Cielo project with our multi-petabyte storage solution - managing massive amounts of data and providing the highest levels of performance, scalability and manageability.”