New Computing Center at University of Nebraska Turns to Panasas

Unveiled last week, this new 1150 node cluster is one of the 50  most powerful computers in the world as ranked on the worldwide Top 500 list. The cluster will shortly be upgraded to contain over 60 Teraflops of core processing power, allowing it to join the prestigious ranks as one of the 20 largest supercomputers in the world in 2008.

"We are extremely pleased to have been chosen for this impressive new system at the Holland Computing Center." said Victor Perez, CEO of Panasas, Inc.  "Panasas parallel storage will help the researchers at PKI maximize application performance and accelerate their time to results in a broad range of disciplines including life sciences, national defense, medical and financial analysis."

Panasas participated in the project with other computing industry leaders who share the PKI vision for this new supercomputing center, including Dell, Cisco and Force10 Networks. The new installation will equip computer-science graduates with advanced training in parallel programming to meet the demands of today’s cutting edge research and enterprise computing infrastructures. Panasas executives were on hand at the center for the dedication ceremony last week and also presented a grant to the University of Nebraska Foundation for their student scholarship fund.

"We see this as a tremendous opportunity to advance the research capabilities of the Institute (PKI) to meet the growing and emerging demands of the university community as well as those of our business partners solving national and global issues," said John Callahan, director of technical infrastructure for the Peter Kiewit Institute and co-founder of the HCC. "Panasas parallel storage and the PanFS parallel file system will bring a level of I/O performance and scalability to our facility that will place Holland Computing Center among the most elite in the world."

The award-winning Panasas ActiveStor Parallel storage is an ideal fit for this installation because of its unique ability to reliably maximize parallel application performance on very large clusters. Linear scaling of performance, nearly unlimited growth in capacity and appliance-like management are all attributes that have propelled Panasas parallel storage to leadership in the high-performance computing industry.

"Dell and Panasas worked closely together on this project. The superior performance and cost-effectiveness of the combined solution was exactly what the team at PKI required to implement a world-class cluster infrastructure," said Kevin Noreen, director of alliances, Dell, Inc. "Our partnership and success with Panasas continues to grow as HPC customers continue to migrate to parallel storage that is both reliable and scalable."

Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage with its embedded PanFS parallel file system enables scientists, engineers and researchers to dramatically speed up application performance and time to results. A direct access path between cluster server nodes and Panasas parallel storage eliminates delays that are normal for traditional SAN and NAS products.

Panasas, Inc.