DDN Selected to Support NCSA’s Blue Waters HPC

DataDirect Networks, Inc.
announced that the National Center for
Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) has selected the DDN SFA12K storage
array to build a 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 endeavors and has been
associated with each of their major computing initiatives," said Alex
Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, 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 500PB and 100GB/s of storage
performance. To accelerate access to this massive storage environment, NCSA
selected DDN SFA12K storage systems with IB connectivity to consolidate their
archive infrastructure using only a small number of high-speed DDN
enterprise storage systems.

Selected as HPCWire’s 2012 Storage Product of the Year (Editor’s
Choice), the SFA12K delivers the storage high single-platform
performance and 1.4 million flash IOPS. With IB and FC connectivity
options, the system is designed to scale file storage systems to 1TB⁄s and
beyond with 25 arrays.