SCIENCE

Penguin Computing is redefining the way storage interacts and scales with a Linux cluster with the announcement of IceBreaker, a new line of storage solutions designed to make extremely high-performance computing even faster.

Penguin Computing’s IceBreaker is a full range of scalable storage solutions from IceBreaker NX, a no-frills direct-attached storage device, to IceBreaker EX, a high-performance parallel file system solution designed for high-availability, scalability and ease of management. Building on the foundation of Penguin expertise in Linux, HPC and high speed interconnect fabrics and applications, IceBreaker completes the Penguin HPC solution portfolio and delivers multi-terabyte datasets to compute nodes and applications.

“Penguin’s IceBreaker is coming at a good time,” said Charles Wuischpard, Penguin Computing CEO. “Disk I/O simply has not kept up with multicore processors and parallelization. With this new line, we have addressed this reality with storage solutions that greatly enhance the performance and productivity of HPC clusters.”

Penguin’s Icebreaker storage solutions include a range of products to support a customer’s workflow requirements. In addition to multiple capacity points from 12TB to 160TB, the IceBreaker FX and IceBreaker SX have specialized RAID-6 technology that enable the disk array performance to match the 40Gbps throughput of an InfiniBand Quad Data Rate (QDR) fabric. By adding Lustre distributed filesystem technology for large shared infrastructure, the IceBreaker SX can support an unlimited number of clients with ultra-fast storage.

A large private university in the Midwest installed IceBreaker FX with their Penguin Linux cluster to improve the I/O performance of their research application. The application generates large amounts of data that must be offloaded to storage during the compute process and integrated for final analysis. Using IceBreaker FX significantly improved the performance of their research application and researchers found they were finishing compute runs in a fraction of the time.

Penguin Computing will be showcasing their IceBreaker product line at SuperComputing 2010 in New Orleans, Louisiana, November 15–18, 2010.