Clemson University Deploys Panasas

Panasas, Inc. announced that the Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS) has chosen the Panasas ActiveStor(TM) parallel storage system to help accelerate its research and innovation. CU-CCMS is a comprehensive computational engineering center dedicated to solving the most complex problems for the automotive, aviation, and energy industries.

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CU-CCMS uses massive-scale engineering simulation to help industry sponsors reduce development time, improve product quality and cost, and achieve success in the global marketplace. The center operates one of the top 10 most powerful university supercomputers in the United States, according to the November 2008 list of top 500 supercomputer sites.

"After an exhaustive search for a fully integrated hardware-software solution to take care of our parallel I/O storage need, we chose Panasas," said Dr. James Leylek, executive director of CU-CCMS. "The fact that some of our key clients provided powerful, positive and convincing testimonials made it relatively easy for us to decide on the Panasas system. We’re solving the industry’s toughest engineering challenges, and we needed dramatic simulation time improvements. We’re confident that with Panasas, our customers’ most mission critical computer-aided engineering computations will scale to their full potential."

The CU-CCMS system consists of 430 Sun blade servers, with a total of 3,440 Intel Xeon processing cores and 14 terabytes (TB) of memory. The system completed the LINPACK benchmark at 27.3 TFLOPS, or 27.3 trillion mathematical computations per second, which ranks it among the world’s most powerful computer systems. The addition of Panasas technology resulted in substantially higher levels of overall throughput due to the benefits of a parallel file system and storage architecture that enables accelerated input and output of simulation data.

"Our parallel storage is optimized to respond broadly to high performance demands and in particular to large-scale application environments," said Randy Strahan, CEO, Panasas. "Working with CU-CCMS provides an extraordinary opportunity to enable world class research engineers to test the outer boundaries of performance and help drive innovation in the transportation and energy industries."