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Britain’s Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Picks Panasas

In 8.5PB HPC storage deployment

Panasas, Inc. announced that Rutherford Appleton Laboratory
(RAL), one of the UK’s principal government labs and part of the Science and Technology Facilities Council
(STFC), has introduced a new HPC facility,
featuring Panasas ActiveStor 11.


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The advanced parallel storage system will further RAL’s global climate research
capabilities as it satisfies the lab’s substantial scalability, performance and
cost requirements.

"The Panasas parallel
file system remains resilient even at scale, and the direct and parallel access
to the storage pool means that we can work on our most complex simulations,
unaffected by the system bottlenecks of our previous equipment,
" said Bryan Lawrence, professor of Weather and Climate Computing at the
University of Reading, and director of Models and Data for the National Centre
for Atmospheric Science (NCAS). "The
Panasas solution gives us powerful HPC capabilities to help leverage our
massive datasets to advance essential scientific discovery.
"

"We are especially
impressed with how easy ActiveStor is to use and manage,
" said Dr.
Peter Oliver of the Scientific Computing Technology Group (e-Science Centre).
"Despite its obvious sophistication,
it requires minimal staff to maintain so that researchers can concentrate on
their simulations – not on cumbersome system administration.
"

The deployment comprises facilities distributed across four sites,
including at RAL, and was funded by the 2011 investment of £145 million in
e-infrastructure by the UK government’s Department for Business, Innovation and
Skills. The massive storage deployment introduces a new shared-resource
approach to research for the participating organizations. Almost 8.5PB of
ActiveStor 11 storage is deployed across three NCAS research sites: 6.6PB at
RAL, 720 TB at the University of Reading, 180TB at the University of Leeds, and
900TB at a fourth site, the International Space and Innovation Centre (ISIC).
The integrated NCAS and ISIC systems represents one of the largest HPC storage
deployments in Great Britain.

"European investments in
high performance computing started to increase within the last two years, and
that growth is expected to continue over the next few years as more nations
recognize the strategic importance of HPC,
" said Earl Joseph, IDC
program VP for HPC. "The new Rutherford Appleton Laboratory deployment is a great example of
multiple institutions working together to make efficient use of new government
funding, enabling scientists across the UK and Europe to collaborate in order
to improve climate and earth science research. By offering a comprehensive,
fully integrated solution that is easy to use and manage, Panasas is
increasingly relevant for these types of large-scale deployments.
"

"Panasas delivers high
performance, highly scalable parallel storage systems that enable researchers
at the world’s leading HPC centers to conduct critical, often life-saving work
without having to worry about the challenges of deploying and managing these
complex systems,
" said Faye Pairman, president and CEO at Panasas.
"The RAL deployment is particularly
impressive due to its sheer size, and we look forward to providing Panasas
solutions and technical expertise to the region’s other government laboratories
for their big data applications as countries across Europe continue to invest in
high performance computing infrastructure.
"

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