U.S. Department of Energy Implements 55PB on NetApp E-Series

NetApp, Inc. announced that the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE) has selected the company to provide the storage foundation for its Sequoia supercomputer.

Sequoia, which will be deployed in 2012 at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in Livermore, California, is expected to be one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers, managing massive compute workloads where real-time analytics, scalable performance, and secure storage are mission critical.

LLNL is a DoE/National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) laboratory with a primary mission of ensuring the safety, security, and reliability of the nation’s aging nuclear deterrent without underground testing. Other missions that leverage the lab’s high-performance computing capabilities include nonproliferation, counterterrorism, energy security, and understanding climate change.

Sequoia will be used for a variety of scientific and engineering applications that require high-performance computing capabilities. Calculations will primarily focus on LLNL’s nuclear security mission, as well as on other national security challenges. Sequoia is expected to be twice as fast as today’s most powerful system and will have a peak speed of twenty thousand trillion arithmetic operations per second. As a point of comparison, if every one of the 6.7 billion people on earth had a hand calculator and worked together on a calculation 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, it would take 320 years to accomplish what Sequoia will be able to do in one hour.

"Sequoia’s supercomputing capabilities will provide LLNL with the ability to assess the accuracy of various nuclear weapons simulations. The simulations are fundamental to ensuring the viability of the nation’s nuclear weapons program without having to actively test them and also provide valuable insight into the underpinning science," said Michel McCoy, program director of LLNL’s Advanced Simulation and Computing program. "Because of the system’s extraordinary capabilities, we need a storage infrastructure that will deliver the extreme performance, scalability, and reliability that are optimal for the taxing applications that we run."

To store and manage all of this critical data, LLNL will leverage a solution built on 55PB of NetApp E-Series storage that will provide over 1TB/sec to the Lustre file system.

"The Sequoia system will enable LLNL to open up new doors for scientific discovery and exploration," said Addison Snell, CEO, Intersect360 Research. "The NetApp E-Series storage platform will play a vital role in Sequoia’s ability to process, manage, and store the immense amount of data and information required for its various workloads."

"More and more organizations in the federal sector are taking advantage of the immense computing power that big data technology provides, and LLNL is a great example of that," said Mark Weber, president of U.S. Public Sector, NetApp. "NetApp is working closely with organizations like LLNL throughout the U.S. government to provide the innovative storage solutions required today to solve the challenges of tomorrow. We are honored to provide LLNL the storage foundation for what will be one of the world’s most impressive supercomputers."