23 LSI Engenio 7900 HPC Storage Systems for 2.7PB Installed

LSI Corporation announced that 23 LSI Engenio 7900 HPC storage systems will be installed at the Department of Energy’s (DOE) National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) as part of a next-generation Cray, Inc.‘ supercomputing system.

NERSC will augment their facility and the existing 352 teraflop Cray XT4 system with a new Cray supercomputer. The first phase of the augmentation project, which is now undergoing early testing, incorporates a Cray XT5 supercomputer featuring 23 LSI Engenio HPC storage systems. The high-performance LSI storage will enable NERSC to store up to 2.7 petabytes (PB) of scientific data with a sustained data transfer rate of 25 GB/s. The full Cray supercomputing solution is expected to go into production in late 2010.

"With more than 3,000 researchers, NERSC’s workload stresses all aspects of the systems we deploy," said NERSC Director Kathy Yelick. "As scientific computing capabilities continue to grow, it is critical that our supporting storage infrastructure provides the performance and data protection required to enable the next big scientific breakthrough."

Sponsored by the DOE’s Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research, NERSC is the primary high-performance computing (HPC) facility for open scientific research within the DOE. The scientific users cover a broad set of scientific areas such as climate modeling, biology, chemistry, environmental sciences, geosciences, astrophysics and other related disciplines.

"LSI is proud to be providing the data storage backbone of one of the world’s leading supercomputing centers," said Steve Hochberg, senior director, HPC segment, LSI. "This stands as a testament to the LSI Engenio 7900 HPC system’s performance and high reliability, and we’re honored to play an integral role in the important scientific research conducted at this premier government facility."

The LSI Engenio 7900 HPC system combines industry-leading bandwidth and flexible host connectivity, including InfiniBand and 8 Gb/s Fibre Channel, with scalability up to 480 drives and advanced reliability features. The system is designed to provide HPC facilities with continuous high-speed data accessibility and protection across a wide range of HPC workloads.

With more than 80 petabytes of storage deployed across a broad spectrum of HPC environments, LSI Engenio storage systems are helping to accelerate scientific research and innovation for many of the world’s largest government and university-based research centers.