11.12.08

New System Accelerates Petascale Computation for Breakthrough Science and Engineering

DataDirect Networks, Inc. the data infrastructure provider for the most extreme, highest performance computing environments in the world, today announced that the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has successfully deployed Intrepid, one of the world's fastest supercomputers for open science, debuting at number three on the Top500 most powerful supercomputers, based on June 2008 rankings. The system has a peak performance of 557 teraflops or 557 trillion calculations per second.

Intrepid combines one of the world's fastest machines with advanced technology capabilities from Argonne, DataDirect Networks, IBM and Myricom, to meet the intense computing and data demands of petascale computing as part of the DOE's effort to provide leadership-class computing resources to the scientific community. Located at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in Illinois, Intrepid is an IBM Blue Gene/P high-performance computing system configured with 163,840 processor cores, 80 terabytes of memory, a Myricom network, GPFS file system and PVFS, an open source parallel file system developed via a community led by Argonne. It also leverages 17 DataDirect Networks' S2A9900 high performance storage platforms which provide over eight petabytes of data storage capacity and an aggregate speed of 95 gigabytes per second.

"Our goal in designing the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility was to dramatically advance computing to provide an open environment for researchers to develop, collaborate and expand research in areas such as understanding the molecular basis of Parkinson's disease, designing more efficient jet engines and assessing the impact of climate change on forest ecology," said Bill Allcock, who leads advanced integration projects at ALCF, Argonne. "We selected DataDirect Networks because of their performance. We have also had a long-standing, successful partnership with DataDirect Networks on several other projects such as the Jazz cluster and first phase of the ALCF." Argonne National Laboratory provides in-depth expertise in computation and computer sciences to optimize applications and enable breakthrough research from virtually every scientific discipline, to find exciting and creative new solutions to pressing national problems in science and technology.

Most of the facility's computing time will be allocated by the Department of Energy's Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program. This program seeks computationally-intensive research projects from industry, academia, and research organizations, which are poised to make high-impact scientific advances through the use of a large allocation of computer time and data storage. One such program is the collaboration between Argonne and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), in which NOAA is committed to 2.5 million hours on Intrepid to rework its climate and weather modeling.

"Being able to assess the impacts of global warming and to be able to predict high-impact weather events in order to aid in policy-making decisions are just two of the critical projects that Intrepid enables," said Dr. Pete Beckman, Division Director of the ALCF. ALCF represents one of the nation'ss largest production computing facilities and closely partners with multiple organizations for the ongoing advancement of scientific research.

"Argonne's research enables breakthroughs in science and engineering that will change the way we live," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and Co-Founder, DataDirect Networks. "DataDirect Networks' industry-leading high performance storage platforms provide the central repository which allows scientists that conduct life-altering research to collaborate on a daily basis. We are proud to work with Argonne and be a part of this extraordinary project." With over 160 petabytes installed worldwide, DataDirect Networks' S2A solutions deliver more aggregate bandwidth to the Top500 Supercomputers than any other IT vendor, including six of the world's Top10, 28 of the Top 50 and 48 of the Top100 fastest supercomputers.

Company Demonstrations at SC08

At SC08 the industry-leading S2A9900 storage platform will power the SCinet 40Gb/s Infiniband Network--the world's largest 40Gb/s networking ecosystem demonstration--supporting a real-time rendering application of a Boeing 777 jetliner. With its unparalleled high bandwidth capabilities, the S2A9900 will also serve as the extreme storage behind Caltech's entry for the SC08 Bandwidth Challenge. DataDirect Networks will demonstrate its comprehensive portfolio of high-bandwidth HPC storage solutions from Nov.17-20, at the Austin Convention Center in Austin, Texas at exhibit #1233.

About the S2A9900

As DataDirect Networks' flagship eighth generation S2A platform, the industry-leading S2A9900 provides extreme performance and capacity, with the ability to manage 1.2 petabytes in only two floor tiles and deliver sustained throughput of up to 6 gigabytes per second for both writes and reads, per appliance.

The S2A9900 enables HPC sites to run multiple applications simultaneously in parallel, whereas conventional, general purpose storage systems force them to run applications sequentially, costing more time, more money and more management personnel. Additionally, the S2A9900 is the only storage platform that writes data as fast as it reads it, with guaranteed QoS, which translates into consistently predictable performance for large content files--critical for HPC environments.