Caltech HPC Installs Panasas Parallel Storage

Panasas, Inc. announced that Caltech’s Center for
Advanced Computing Research (CACR) has installed Panasas ActiveStor 11 to
deliver performance parallel storage as part of its newly upgraded HPC facilities for advanced computational science and
engineering.

CACR operates large-scale computing facilities and provides support
services for numerous campus research groups that require reliable I/O,
including the aeronautics, applied mathematics, astronomy, biology,
engineering, geophysics, materials science, and physics departments. Because
CACR previously experienced non-critical data loss with its legacy storage
systems, and endured the use of problematic system administration tools, it was
important to ensure that manageability, reliability, and stability of the
parallel file system and its underlying storage hardware was best-in-class.

"We needed a high
performance storage solution that was big enough and fast enough for our I/O
demands, and that would not get in the way of our research. It was key to be
able to take file system usability and customer support as a given,"
said Sharon Brunett, senior scientist at CACR who was tasked with the overall
Panasas ActiveStor selection and installation. "ActiveStor is an extremely reliable parallel storage platform. It has
eliminated many of our file system administration and system management
hassles, as well as user complaints about lackluster performance and
application response times."

ActiveStor appliances eliminate the bottlenecks found in traditional
NAS systems, accelerating application I/O performance by enabling HPC cluster
nodes to directly access a single, scalable file system in parallel. Users add individual blade chassis or entire racks to non-disruptively scale
the capacity and performance of the file system as storage requirements grow.
This makes it easy to linearly scale capacity to six PB and
performance to 150GB/s, highest single file system throughput
per TB of SATA storage. Its blade architecture blends performance,
capacity, and cost-efficiency in a system optimized for scientific computing
applications.

"With a limited system
administration budget, it was clear that CACR needed a powerful, yet easy to
use, fully integrated parallel storage solution that would allow researchers to
focus on their work, rather than on IT headaches," said Bill Ribera, VP
of WW sales and field operations at Panasas. "Panasas ActiveStor with the fully integrated PanFS parallel file system
delivered on all fronts."