Caltech Selects IBRIX Fusion for Researching Earthquakes

IBRIX today announced that the California Institute of Technology has deployed IBRIX Fusion in its Geosciences Computational Facility to accelerate the performance of applications used by scientists to gain valuable insight into the devastating effects of earthquakes worldwide. The IBRIX Fusion Parallel File System, an enterprise-class, software-based scalable file serving solution, currently supports Caltech's CITerra cluster, a 2048 processor system that ranks #41 on the current Top 500 Supercomputer Sites list. "We chose IBRIX Fusion because it allows us to run more detailed seismological applications in a stable and highly scalable environment that is six times larger than our previous cluster," said Dr. Jeroen Tromp, Director of the Seismological Laboratory at Caltech and one of the primary users of the CITerra cluster. "With these added capabilities, we are now able to accelerate the performance of our seismological simulations, leading to substantially improved models of earthquake-generated seismic waves and, ultimately, better disaster preparedness." The Seismological Laboratory, established in 1921, maintains a database of global large earthquakes and publishes breaking news on worldwide earthquake activity. Seismologists rely on advanced computational power to develop three-dimensional models and run simulations of the Earth's tectonic activity and complex plate boundaries. Scientists study multiple simulations concurrently to plot the differences and pinpoint tectonic events. In an environment that relies upon tens to thousands of processors to run a single application, IBRIX Fusion enables Caltech to accelerate the performance of its applications by increasing I/O to their compute cluster while providing the ability to scale their storage infrastructure independently and non-disruptively. "Having IBRIX Fusion successfully running on the CITerra supercomputer and supporting critical research on one of the most devastating natural phenomena is a testament to the performance and flexibility of our signature product," said Joe DeRosa, Vice President of Marketing, IBRIX. "This selection not only validates the capabilities of IBRIX Fusion, but it has the potential to positively affect the development of new applications and modeling tools that will advance preparedness for such catastrophic events." IBRIX Fusion Scalable File Serving Solution IBRIX Fusion is a software-only, highly-available, scalable file serving solution that allows enterprise system administrators to build file systems that can scale to up to 16 petabytes of capacity in a single namespace, and provide up to one terabyte per second of aggregate I/O throughput performance independently and non-disruptively. Equally applicable for both high-performance/high-throughput applications as well as metadata-intensive, small block enterprise applications, the multipurpose IBRIX Fusion file serving solution delivers I/O performance and scalability that is greater than that achieved by other file serving solutions. IBRIX Fusion is hardware, network, and protocol independent and can be deployed as either a host-installed cluster file system solution or exported over network file system (NFS), common internet file system (CIFS), or other industry standard protocols as a scalable network attached storage (NAS) solution.