DataDirect Networks Chosen by Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory

To help the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) reduce dependence on foreign oil and accelerate discoveries to preserve the environment, the Environmental Molecular Science Laboratory (EMSL), a national scientific user facility located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL), has implemented DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) high performance block and file storage solutions to provide a storage foundation for ongoing alternative energy research projects.

Over the years, scientific requirements have changed as computational models have grown in size and granularity. Faced with an increased need for more powerful, scalable computing and storage resources to support data-intensive climate modeling and environmental research that was straining its legacy supercomputer platform Chinook, PNNL engaged in a technology refresh led by supercomputer manufacturer Atipa Technologies, while upgrading to DDN high-performance SFA 12K block storage platform and EXAScaler file storage appliance.

Funded by DOE’s Office of Biological & Environmental Research, EMSL provides a HPC capability optimized for molecular-level modeling and simulation through its Molecular Science Computing (MSC) initiative.

More than 300 scientists from academia, industry and government use the MSC capability annually to drive multiple free energy simulations and structural genomics, which are all processed and accessed through its new supercomputer Cascade.

Following a migration to its new Atipa supercomputer and DDN storage system, Cascade delivers improvements in compute and storage power, handling up to 3.4 quadrillion calculations per second and 2.7PB of usable storage. With a faster, more efficient storage platform that delivers up to 75GB/s, users can run simultaneous climate modeling and chemistry computation codes without worry over compute or storage performance bottlenecks.

Now ranked No. 13 on the TOP500 list of the world’s fastest computers, in comparison to its predecessor, Cascade is 20X faster, delivers 10X the storage capacity, and more than twice the IO bandwidth. Multiple, large computational chemistry and climate models can be run concurrently with no resource contention, and individual experiments are seeing faster results, thereby shortening the time to new scientific discoveries.

DDN Scalability, Density and Performance to Speed Science

DDN SFA12K storage empowers researchers to change how research hours are allocated as so much more can be accomplished in less time.
DDN’s performance enables peak performance of up to 75GB/s along with a six-times multiple improvement in cluster performance rates.
DDN’s density allows users to replace as many as 40 racks of legacy storage with as few as three racks, lowering power, cooling and administrative overhead for TCO.
With network nodes that are hundreds of times faster than those on older systems, researchers now can go beyond the molecular level to the atomic level while having the flexibility to run a different software codes without concern over storage capacity or performance bottlenecks.

Molly Rector, CMO, DDN, said: “We’re proud to be the storage behind today’s groundbreaking research at organizations like EMSL. Many organizations today are struggling to maximize the value of existing storage resources and IT budgets, while balancing high performance requirements in order to keep pace with scientific discovery. With the performance, scale and massive capacity of DDN storage, researchers at these organizations are able to achieve new levels of discovery at lower TCO by scaling their data to include bigger models and larger computation sets.”

Case study

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Atipa to Supply HPC to Energy’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory
With 2.7PB of storage