Five LSI Engenio 7900 HPC Storage Systems Installed by Swiss National Supercomputing Centre

LSI Corporation announced that five LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage systems have been installed by the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) as part of an upgrade from its current Cray XT3 supercomputer to the new, faster Cray XT5 system.

The massively parallel Cray XT5 supercomputer is integrated with five LSI Engenio 7900 HPC systems, delivering a sustained data transfer rate of 20 GB/s for the incorporated Lustre file system. The recently completed upgrade has resulted in a system that is the most powerful supercomputer in Switzerland and one of the largest high-performance computing (HPC) systems in Europe.

"The upgrade to the Cray XT5 with integrated LSI Engenio 7900 storage is a significant step toward sustained petascale computing capability," said Prof. Thomas Schulthess, director of CSCS. "The exceptional storage performance is important to achieve a well-balanced supercomputer that will enable our users to push the boundaries of simulation-based science and gain scientific insights that would otherwise be impossible."

The CSCS research facility develops and promotes technical and scientific services for the Swiss research community in the fields of high-performance and high-throughput computing. The new Engenio 7900 HPC systems, which were implemented by Cray, are the latest in a series of successful LSI storage installations at the CSCS which have been integral to the Centre’s breakthrough results in research and petascale computing technology. The new Cray XT5 supercomputer with integrated LSI storage will enable large-scale simulation-based science in fields ranging from climatology and geology to genetics, astronomy and experimental medicine.

"The LSI Engenio 7900 was chosen for its ability to maximize supercomputing efficiency while meeting the customer’s price/performance requirements," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, HPC segment, LSI. "With over 80 petabytes deployed across a wide range of HPC environments, LSI Engenio storage systems are trusted by the world’s leading server OEMs and end customers to deliver the performance and enterprise-class reliability that the world’s most demanding applications environments require."

Based on LSI seventh-generation XBB2 architecture, the Engenio 7900 HPC is ideally suited for computing environments that store and utilize vast amounts of data for high-bandwidth and mixed-workload applications. The system combines industry-leading bandwidth and flexible host connectivity, including InfiniBand(R) and 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel, with scalability to 480 drives and advanced reliability features designed for continuous high-speed data accessibility and protection across a wide range of HPC workloads.