STORAGE

New System - the World's #3 Supercomputer - will Push the Boundaries of Scientific Discovery: DataDirect Networks (DDN), the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest performance computing environments in the world, today announced that NASA has selected its flagship S2A9900 storage platforms to provide the data backbone for Pleiades, the space agency's new supercomputer. The goal of the Pleiades project -- named after the open star cluster of the same name -- is to develop an extremely powerful modeling and simulation environment of unprecedented speed and capacity to support research and engineering within each of NASA's four mission directorates. The Pleiades project is located at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at the NASA Ames Research Center in Moffett Field, California. "We have some of the biggest systems in the world, and with Pleiades being the largest InfiniBand cluster, we needed the I/O capabilities of the storage to scale equivalently to support our computational and simulation environments," said Alan Powers, HPC Technical Director, Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC), a global leader in providing technology-enabled solutions and services. "We chose DDN because of its performance, scalability, and data integrity capabilities, and the company has been a trusted partner for deploying our I/O solutions for several other projects." Pleiades is a 51,200-core SGI Altix ICE+ system, leveraging six DDN S2A9900 high performance storage platforms and a Lustre file system. The system scales easily, both in capacity and performance as NASA's requirements evolve. Ranked today as the third fastest supercomputer in the world, according to the latest Top500 listing, Pleiades will be capable of generating 609 trillion calculations per second of peak performance. "DDN has had a long and successful history of working with NASA; in fact, NASA was the very first customer of our Silicon Storage Architecture platforms," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DDN. "This is a great example of how our solutions are designed to meet the needs of the most extreme environments in the world, as the Pleiades project is pushing the boundaries of scientific discovery as NASA furthers its exploration, science, space and aeronautic research to improve our quality-of-life. We congratulate NASA on the continued success of its strategic research initiatives." Pleiades is DDN's fifth project with NASA, having successfully delivered on Columbia, Schirra, RTJones, and Hyperwall-2, the world's largest known visualization system. With over 160 petabytes installed worldwide, DDN S2A solutions deliver more aggregate bandwidth to the Top500 Supercomputers than any other IT vendor, including seven of the world's Top10, 28 of the Top 50 and 48 of the Top100 fastest supercomputers.