DataDirect Storage Cluster Powers National Center of HPC

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that Taiwan’s National Center of High-Performance Computing (NCHC), located in Hsinchu Science Park, has selected Acer’s server solution with DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) technology to provide the data backbone for one of the world’s fastest supercomputers.

Measured at over 90GB/s, the new storage system at NCHC will achieve storage cluster and file system performance – eliminating application I/O bottlenecks and ensuring very high levels of cluster utilization.

With this announcement, NCHC joins leading supercomputing centers worldwide who have chosen DDN’s open storage platforms to scale cluster computer environments and optimize HPC parallel file system environments.

When completed in March, NCHC’s supercomputer will offer high-performance computing (HPC) services to a wide range of research and industrial customers in Taiwan, and is expected to place in the top 50 of TOP500.org’s ranking as one of the fastest supercomputers in the world. Partnering with Acer’s computing and facility expertise, DDN will provide a storage cluster capable of up to 90 GB/s of aggregate throughput based on its SFA10000 technology and integrated ExaScaler parallel file system, which incorporates the open-source Lustre parallel file system.

“We are pleased to provide NCHC with an extremely scalable storage solution for Taiwan’s rapidly-growing supercomputing program,” said Paul Bloch, DDN President and co-founder. “DDN’s SFA technology is the global standard for organizations needing unsurpassed performance, efficiency and scalability as they push into a new, highly competitive era of supercomputing. We look forward to a long and successful relationship with NCHC as they build out one of East Asia’s largest data infrastructures.”

NCHC marks the initial partnership between Acer and DDN, and is DDN’s first customer in Taiwan. The partnership follows DDN’s plan for worldwide expansion as global HPC leaders choose DDN as their platform of choice for data intensive computation. DDN currently provides more bandwidth to the global top 500 supercomputers than all other vendors combined.