SCIENCE

Panasas has announced that it has been awarded a subcontract by Lockheed Martin to supply department-wide storage and parallel file system infrastructure as part of the Department of Defense's (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMP). The HPCMP supports DoD scientists and engineers by providing exceptional HPC systems, large-scale data storage and complementary technologies. With Panasas ActiveStor storage and the PanFS parallel file system, DoD research scientists and engineers will benefit from faster data access, more scalable storage, integrated data protection, and greatly simplified data manageability as they work to solve complex national defense challenges.

"We are pleased to be working with Lockheed Martin in order to provide premier parallel storage systems to the Department of Defense for its HPC Modernization Program," said Barbara Murphy, chief marketing officer of Panasas. "Panasas sets the standard for high performance parallel storage, and we are confident that ActiveStor and PanFS will deliver the desired results for the DoD."

Prior to its storage enhancement program, user archival and retrieval demands were pushing the performance limits of the DoD tape archival system. By deploying Panasas parallel storage, each site provides additional near-HPC storage to reduce data access times. By providing users additional time to analyze their computational data before having to archive it, the DoD HPCMP hopes to dramatically reduce the cost associated with storing unnecessary data. Because Panasas provides RAID data protection as an integral part of its parallel file system, the DoD HPCMP does not need additional third-party RAID controllers, thus reducing cost and complexity while eliminating performance bottlenecks and single points of failure.

Panasas storage is deployed at the following DoD HPC centers:

·         Army Research Laboratory DSRC at Aberdeen Providing Ground, MD

·         U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory DSRC at Wright Patterson AFB, OH

·         U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center DSRC in Vicksburg, MS

·         Navy DoD Supercomputing Resource Center at Stennis Space Center, MS