STORAGE

FREMONT, Calif. -- Zambeel, Inc., an enterprise- class network-attached storage vendor, today announced that The U.S. Department of Energy's National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory has implemented a Zambeel Aztera storage system and software to accelerate the productivity of scientists running high performance scientific simulations and computations. NERSC has deployed Zambeel Aztera as part of its Parallel Distributed System Facility (PDSF), a 390-processor Linux cluster used by researchers for algorithm development, simulations, and data analysis in large-scale high energy physics and nuclear science investigations. NERSC participated in Zambeel's beta program and purchased an Aztera system immediately after the beta concluded. "Because the beta system we deployed was so stable, even in our extreme performance environment, we put the Aztera system into production use after only a month of testing," said Shane Canon, Lead Administrator for PDSF of the NERSC Center at Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. "The largest user of our cluster was able to complete its analysis much earlier than expected because the system delivered the necessary performance even under heavy loads." More than 2,100 scientists harness NERSC's computing power to tackle science's biggest and most challenging problems. NERSC delivers more than 50 million processor hours of compute cycles annually to the United States Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science research community, including DOE laboratories, more than 75 major research universities, industry, and other Federal agencies. NERSC's Parallel Distributed Systems Facility provides computing power and storage facilities to a variety of global research projects, including: -- The STAR experiment uses the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider at Brookhaven National Laboratory to probe fundamental properties of matter. The experiment includes over 400 scientists from 33 institutions in 7 countries and is the largest user of PDSF. -- The ATLAS experiment is studying the basics of matter, including origin of mass and proton-proton interactions, and is being constructed by 1700 collaborators representing more than 150 institutions in more than 30 countries. The ATLAS experiment is being conducted at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CERN, in Switzerland. -- Researchers at Sudbury Neutrino Observatory (SNO), based in Ontario, Canada, are capturing and analyzing data that has provided revolutionary insight into the properties of neutrinos and the core of the sun. Researchers from Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States are conducting this research at SNO. "Previous storage systems we have investigated haven't been capable of meeting the performance requirements of a large cluster running data intensive applications. This can lead to poor utilization of the computational hardware," Canon continues. "With the Aztera system, we are able to run applications across the entire cluster which simultaneously access data on Aztera and still get great performance." "The NERSC deployment highlights the benefits of Aztera's unique ability to scale file systems to meet users' needs, and to scale performance independent of capacity," said Darren Thomas, President and CEO of Zambeel. "NERSC's results with Aztera demonstrate the cost savings Aztera delivers through increased productivity and dramatically reduced data management burden."