Intel and DDN Join Forces

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) has been selected to collaborate with Intel Corp. as part of the Lawrence Livermore National Security, LLC (LLNS) managed extreme-scale computing research and development FastForward program, sponsored by the US Department of Energy.

As part of this collaboration, DDN will work with Intel under the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract to develop next-generation storage technologies focused on resolving the extreme scalability challenges associated with creating, storing, accessing and protecting data for the Exascale computing era.

"For more than a decade, DDN has been at the forefront of HPC, enabling remarkable scientific and computational breakthroughs as well as significant innovation in the field," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder, DDN. "As we help create the Exascale computing era, we will enable unprecedented levels of discovery in many of the world’s most pressing scientific challenges, including clean energy, medical discovery, climate modeling and nanotechnology. DDN is excited to have been selected as one of the builders of the future of the supercomputing industry."

With an expertise developed through supporting many of supercomputing environments, including 60% of the world’s 100 fastest systems (as of the June 2012 list of the Top500 fastest computers), DDN was selected for this collaboration on the basis of its understanding of HPC storage architectures, parallel file systems at scale and web-scale storage technologies. DDN engineering efforts in the FastForward collaboration will focus on evolving the state-of-the-art in parallel file systems, including the Lustre open-source parallel file system, as well as more tightly integrating compute and storage platforms to achieve greater efficiency and information insight.

The Intel-led collaboration working on the Storage and I/O Research & Development subcontract will focus on three main areas that together cover the Exascale I/O stack from top-to-bottom. Included in the stack is a new storage interface that tightly integrates with the HDF5 scientific data library and data model, a next-generation flash-optimized storage tier designed to accelerate peak I/O loads in HPC environments, and a massively scalable storage interface designed to support the storage foundation requirements to achieve Exascale infrastructure scalability.

The FastForward program is administered by the Department of Energy and contracted through Lawrence Livermore National Security as part of a seven-lab consortium including Argonne National Laboratory, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Los Alamos National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, and Sandia National Laboratories. Industry partners include leading IT technology providers, including AMD, Intel, and Nvidia.