DataDirect Networks selected to support NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer

23 Apr 2012 Chatsworth - The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has selected the DataDirectNetworks' (DDN) SFA12K storage array to build an unparalleled system delivering 100GB/s of storage performance for archiving data on the upcoming Blue Waters supercomputing system. With a sustained performance of over 1 Petaflop on a range of real-world science and engineering applications, this system is expected to be one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

"Since 2002, DDN has partnered with NCSA on world-leading supercomputing endeavours and has been associated with each of their major computing initiatives", stated Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DDN. "We are pleased to once again work with NCSA and be part of the Blue Waters project, which will play a critical role in enabling breakthrough advancements in many fields of science."

NCSA's Blue Waters supercomputer is designed by Cray as a Massively Parallel Processing (MPP) system, and is built with more than 380,000 AMD processor cores and 25,000 compute nodes, and is designed with an integrated archive environment that is scalable to over 500 petabytes and 100GB/s of storage performance. To accelerate access to this massive storage environment, NCSA selected DDN SFA12K storage systems with InfiniBand connectivity to consolidate their archive infrastructure using only a small number of very high-speed DDN enterprise storage systems.

The SFA12K delivers the storage industry’s highest single-platform performance and 1.4 million Flash IOPS. With InifniBand and fibre channel connectivity options, the system is designed to easily scale file storage systems to 1TB⁄s and beyond with as little as 25 arrays.