Panasas CTO and Co-Author of RAID Discusses the Future of Storage for Next-Generation Supercomputers -- At yesterday's High Performance Computing Conference (HPC) at Stanford University, Panasas' chief technology officer Garth Gibson delivered the keynote in which he outlined how a new storage technology will power next-generation computing systems. As the industry approaches the era of petascale supercomputers, they will be 1,000 times faster than today's terascale supercomputers. Such machines could help build cars and airplanes faster and without costly models, enable more exact weather forecasting and early warning systems and accelerate bio-medical advancements that can improve the quality of life. "Within the next few years, petascale computing will make it possible to solve some of the most challenging and complex of problems that even today's fastest supercomputers have not been able to tackle," said Garth Gibson, chief technology officer at Panasas. "A key driver for these systems will be a new generation of high-end storage to meet the increased ultra high-performance and scalability requirements that petascale computing will demand." Stanford's second annual HPC conference brought together business leaders, academic researchers and computational scientists to discuss pioneering advancements in the use of high performance computing. It is part of an ongoing program between industry, academic and government organizations to help improve the nation's global competitiveness and productivity with the use of HPC applications and computing systems. "With both industry leaders and HPC scientists, this conference represented each component of our diverse field," said Steve Jones, technology operations manager and HPC Conference chairperson at Stanford University. "We believe that to compete effectively in today's global market requires new methodologies in solving very large and highly complex problems that high performance computing and the new type of storage that Garth addressed in his conference keynote." Gibson is a recognized authority on network storage and parallel file systems. His groundbreaking work on RAID (an acronym for Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) is now a checklist design feature for all enterprise storage industry products. In addition to his CTO role at Panasas, Gibson is also an associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University. While there, he established the university's Parallel Data Lab where extensive research has been conducted on disk array architectures, parallel file system processing, and storage networking and security. Among his industry credentials, Gibson is a member of the technical council of The Storage Networking Industry Association (SNIA) and recipient of an IEEE Information Storage Award.