Consolidating Research Data and Accelerating AI-Driven Discoveries to Deliver Concrete Benefits to Society and Human Health
As part of the Helmholtz Association, Germany’s largest research organization, Helmholtz Munich is one of 19 research centers that develops solutions and technologies for the world of tomorrow.
The research integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) methodologies and spans multiple data-intensive computational applications. Some of these applications include decoding plant genomes, tissue sample testing or creature and epidemiology cohort studies. The knowledge that the centers gain from this research forms the foundation of tomorrow’s medicine and delivers concrete benefits to society and improvements to human health.
Challenges
Within Helmholtz Munich there are multiple institutes that focus on different areas of research that require the need to move, store, and process large amounts of data. The storage infrastructure was hindering compute performance as well as hardware reliability. While these systems may have been appropriate when initially deployed for modest workloads, they couldn’t scale to meet the needs of more modern and sophisticated approaches to analyzing research data.
Solution
A centralized DDN storage system using a global EXAScaler Lustre file system
Four fully populated systems that span a global namespace
SFA NVMe ES400NVX system with GPU integration
Benefits
- Faster data throughput with direct datapaths between storage and GPU
- Improved performance, speed, and reliability significantly impacted researchers’ ability to accelerate the discovery process
- A future-proof infrastructure for any additional AI applications
QuoteBecause we pre-emptively set up high-performance DDN systems, Helmholtz Munich was well-equipped to manage and quickly access the massive data sets generated by this new wave of AI applications.
Dr Alf WachsmannHead of DigIT Infrastructure & Scientific Computing Helmholtz Munich
