MOVIES

MONTREAL -- Maximum Throughput Inc. (www.max-t.com), a developer and provider of high-performance, enterprise-class networked storage solutions, announced today that Sandia National Laboratories has purchased an InfinARRAY single-image distributed filesystem for its Vplant supercomputing cluster. Sandia's scalable cluster (Vplant) is a Dell/Myrinet/Linux cluster of 330 dual 2.0 GHz and 2.4 GHz Xeon processing nodes. It is used primarily for visualization, but its significant compute performance is also employed elsewhere at Sandia. Vplant ranked #32 (with 1272 Gflops) on the Top500 list of supercomputers, as published at the Supercomputing Conference in November 2002. Vplant is a distributed-memory, parallel processing cluster, whose architecture calls for complete scalability of both hardware and software. Vplant is designed to be able to grow physically in discontinuous, heterogeneous steps over time. InfinARRAY -- which leverages commodity hardware and provides massive scalability -- meshes perfectly with this architecture. InfinARRAY is a global, single-image, distributed filesystem designed for high-performance computing clusters. It provides a unified view of an entire storage pool, improving management of storage resources. InfinARRAY can be deployed in three ways: as a massively scalable SAN filesystem, as an NFS gateway to a consolidated storage pool, or as a hybrid of the two. InfinARRAY's low latency communication protocol gives it the ability to serve as both a SAN filesystem and an NFS gateway, where compute nodes in a cluster communicate directly with high-performance storage, while less compute-intensive clients have access to the same storage via file servers. All clients share a unified view of the entire filesystem. Unlike any other product on the market, InfinARRAY is massively scalable in terms of both the amount of physical storage that it can manage, and the rate at which it can move data into and out of that storage. "We are developing Vplant to enable us to visualize the output from very large, complex simulations, which are run on some of the largest computers in the world. We will need to increase Vplant's capabilities even further in order to handle the output from supercomputers that are coming on line in the next couple of years. The ability to scale both capacity and storage I/O was a key consideration in our selection of Max-T's InfinARRAY," said Milton J. Clauser, Ph.D, Project Leader for Vplant Development. "After considerable testing, and comparison with competing products, InfinARRAY stood out with the performance and scalability we sought." "We are strongly committed to providing the supercomputing community with the world's most scalable filesystem," said Giovanni Tagliamonti, CEO at Max-T. "We could not have asked for a better endorsement of our technology than Sandia selecting InfinARRAY for Vplant. "The storage community has debated for quite some time how and where SAN and NAS technologies will come together," said Tagliamonti. "InfinARRAY demonstrates how this convergence will manifest itself."