International Fusion Energy Research Japan Chooses DDN and Bull

DataDirect
Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced it was selected to provide the storage
infrastructure for the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC), an
international nuclear fusion facility researching the use of fusion for the
production of electricity – a safe, inexhaustible, and environmentally
responsible energy source that could resolve the world’s escalating energy
needs.

"Simulation codes in plasma physics – a key to
demonstrating fusion power is a viable and sustainable energy source – produce
vast amounts of data and require extreme I/O performance and scalability," said
Francois Robin of CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy
Commission. "DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture, in combination with the Lustre
file system, has the performance, scalability, and data integrity features
necessary to process, generate and use massive amounts of data without creating
bottlenecks."

CEA has been mandated by F4E (Fusion for Energy, European ‘domestic’ agency
for the construction of ITER and the ‘Broader Approach’) for the construction
and operation with JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency) of the computing center
for IFERC. The DDN-supported supercomputer system will be located in Rokkasho, Japan
(Aomori Prefecture), and will be made available
to more than 1,000 European and Japanese fusion energy researchers.

The IFERC supercomputer is being developed by DDN
partner Bull, a European leader in mission-critical digital information
technology systems.

"With computational power at peak performance
exceeding 1.3 petaflops – more than one quadrillion (1015) mathematical
operations per second, the supercomputer we have designed for IFERC will be one
of the most powerful computing systems in the world," said Pascal Barbolosi, Vice-President,
Extreme Computing at Bull. "We have selected DDN because we know we can draw on
our joint experience in the high performance computing market to provide a big
data storage architecture that could not be developed with conventional storage
technology."

"We are proud that DDN technology will be used to
enable a solution that can bring the international research community closer to
developing and producing clean, safe, sustainable nuclear power," said John
Josephakis, DDN Sr. Vice President, HPC Worldwide Sales. "The challenge before
IFERC is nothing less that solving humanity’s energy crisis. By supporting over
a quadrillion operations a second, DDN’s scalable data infrastructure provides
the extreme levels of performance, capacity, and data integrity required to
manage large scientific datasets and perform complex plasma physics
calculations."

Once complete, the IFERC supercomputer will include:

• DDN SFA10000 system
• More
  than 18.7PB of disk storage
• Over
  120GB/s Lustre File System performance