DDN’s AI Data Intelligence Platform Wins FMS 2025 Best in Show Award 

DDN, the global leader in AI and data intelligence solutions, was awarded the FMS 2025 Best in Show award for Most Innovative Customer Implementation on August 5, 2025, for its collaboration with CINECA, Italy’s premier supercomputing center. This blog explores how DDN’s AI data intelligence platform powers groundbreaking nuclear fusion research and diverse AI/HPC workloads, delivering unmatched performance, scalability, and efficiency. Discover why DDN’s Data Intelligence Platform is trusted by industry leaders like NVIDIA and xAI to drive transformative outcomes in AI infrastructure. 

FMS Awards Chair Jay Kramer praised DDN’s ability to scale securely from terabytes to exabytes, enabling CINECA to drive progress toward a fusion-powered grid by 2050. 

Unifying AI and HPC with DDN’s Data Intelligence Platform 

In the era of generative AI and high-performance computing (HPC), AI infrastructure solutions must overcome complexity, performance bottlenecks, and cost challenges to deliver real-world value. DDN’s Data Intelligence Platform addresses these needs through a cloud-native, software-defined architecture optimized for AI data storage.  

Key benefits of DDN’s unified data intelligence platform include: 

• Simplified Operations: Unifies multi-modal data (video, sensor, text) across cloud, core, and edge, eliminating silos. 
• Extreme Performance: Delivers sub-millisecond latency and terabytes-per-second throughput, ensuring GPU efficiency. 
• Cost Efficiency: Achieves 10x data reduction and 75% less power usage, reducing CAPEX and OPEX for global infrastructure. 
• Secure Scalability: Supports exabyte-scale datasets with native multi-tenancy and 99.999% uptime. 

For example, CINECA uses DDN’s AI storage to accelerate nuclear fusion research, while also supporting medical discoveries and cultural heritage preservation.  

Powering CINECA’s Nuclear Fusion and Scientific Breakthroughs 

Recognized at FMS: The Future of Memory and Storage, DDN’s collaboration with CINECA, one of Europe’s most advanced supercomputing centers, showcases how its AI data intelligence platform powers the €30 billion EUROfusion project, enabling real-time plasma simulations for clean, limitless energy. 

CINECA relies on DDN’s AI data platform to dedicate 95% of its Marconi100 supercomputer to EUROfusion workloads. Simulating plasma behavior at 100 million degrees requires massive data processing across 3,000+ compute units. DDN’s Infinia and EXAScaler solutions deliver: 

• Real-Time Performance: Sub-millisecond latency and terabytes-per-second throughput for continuous plasma modeling and magnetic field optimization. 
• High-Capacity Data Management: Handles 5–6 petabytes of daily data ingestion, enabling AI data intelligence for iterative experimentation. 
• Unified Workflows: Integrates with AI frameworks like TensorFlow, PyTorch, and Spark, streamlining AI storage operations. 
• Reliable Scalability: Ensures 99.999% uptime with fault-tolerant erasure coding, even under extreme workloads. 

Daniele Cesarini, Project Manager, HPC Technology Specialist at CINECA says “DDN supports all our large-scale systems and is synonymous with performance for AI workloads. DDN’s [Data Intelligence] Platform helps us process a large amount of data that we use to transform into real outcomes for scientific workloads. It’s a key technology that we extensively use in our systems for almost 10 years.” 

Beyond fusion, CINECA leverages DDN’s enterprise data platform for early warning systems (e.g., tsunami forecasting) and digital preservation of cultural artifacts, showcasing its versatility across AI infrastructure use cases. Learn more about how the DDN Data Intelligence Platform has impacted other CINECA projects. 

Why DDN Stands Out at FMS 2025 

The FMS 2025 Best in Show Award highlights DDN’s ability to solve critical AI storage challenges, as noted by Sven Oehme, DDN’s CTO: “The real challenge in AI isn’t compute—it’s moving and managing data fast enough to keep up.” DDN’s data intelligence platform excels by: 

• Reducing Complexity: Unifies data across cloud and on-premises environments, simplifying workflows for global infrastructure. 
• Maximizing Performance: Combines EXAScaler’s parallel file system with Infinia’s high-performance S3 interface, proven in NVIDIA DGX SuperPODs. 
• Lowering Costs: Minimizes data movement and infrastructure overhead, saving millions in AI infrastructure expenses. 
• Ensuring Security: Provides granular access controls and encryption, supporting data sovereignty and compliance. 

Turning AI Potential into Tangible Business Value 

DDN’s AI storage solutions deliver measurable outcomes for data-intensive organizations: 

• Faster Innovation: Accelerates AI pipelines for nuclear fusion, medical imaging, and disaster prediction, reducing research timelines by up to 80%. 
• Cost Savings: Achieves 10x data reduction and 75% lower power usage, optimizing AI infrastructure solutions budgets. 
• Reliability and Security: Ensures 99.999% uptime and secure multi-tenancy, ideal for shared global infrastructure environments. 
• Versatile Applications: Powers industries from energy (fusion research) to healthcare (drug discovery) and media (content restoration). 
• Future-Ready Integrations: Seamlessly connects with NVIDIA AI Enterprise tools (NeMo, NIMs, CUDA), trusted by leading AI enterprises and cloud providers. 

Trusted by NVIDIA and xAI, DDN’s AI data platform drives 10x returns, positioning it among leading AI storage companies. See real-world impact at DDN’s Industry Solutions. 

Get Started with DDN’s AI Data Platform 

Ready to eliminate data bottlenecks and accelerate your AI and HPC workloads? Visit DDN’s website to explore the data intelligence platform or contact DDN at sales@ddn.com. Request a proof of concept to experience DDN’s AI storage solutions firsthand. Follow DDN on LinkedIn and X for AI storage solution reviews and updates.