University of Nottingham Extends Panasas Parallel Storage

Panasas,
Inc., a specialist in performance parallel storage for technical
computing applications and big data workloads, announced that the UK’s
University of Nottingham has upgraded its  HPC center with Panasas ActiveStor 12 storage in a 240TB deployment.

The new cluster is used by numerous departments across the university,
including computer science, pharmacy and engineering.

"We
are delighted that the University of Nottingham chose Panasas to satisfy its
HPC storage requirements," said Barbara Murphy, CMO at Panasas. "ActiveStor gives the university unmatched
performance, scalability and reliability without complex and time-consuming
system management. We look forward to continuing to work with the university,
as well as our many other academic customers in the region."

The University of Nottingham, ranked in the
UK’s top 10 in the Shanghai Jiao Tong (SJTU) World University Rankings and
within the top 100 in the QS World University Rankings, first upgraded to
Panasas in 2007 when it purchased an ActiveStor 7 solution to overcome
performance problems associated with its previous storage system.

"We
saw a big improvement in performance with the acquisition of Panasas
ActiveStor," said Chris Booth, senior systems developer. "Also, our previous storage system went down
about once a month. ActiveStor has never gone down – ever."

Researchers in the Physical and Theoretical
Chemistry Department, whose work includes the simulation of proteins to
understand diseases and enable the development of drugs to help fight or prevent
them, are among the most demanding users of the HPC center. Their simulation of
the motion of proteins is a complex task that can involve trillions of
time-steps to map each movement of every protein, requiring a high-performance
compute cluster and parallel storage.

"Our
simulations are computationally challenging, but with the new high performance
computer systems and ActiveStor parallel storage we’re starting to make some
progress," said Professor Jonathan Hirst, head of the physical and theoretical
chemistry department. "Reliability
and unflagging storage performance are indispensable for our research."

With limited IT staff, ease-of-use was a
primary consideration for the university. "ActiveStor is fantastically easy to configure and manage,"
said Dr. Booth. "We don’t have a
dedicated storage administrator, so it’s essential that our systems don’t take
a lot of time and effort to manage."