Alliant Techsystems Opts for Panasas ActiveStor

Panasas,
Inc. announced that Alliant Techsystems, Inc.
(ATK) has standardized on Panasas ActiveStor to speed innovation and reduce
cost in its demanding research, and product performance simulation processes.

ATK is a producer of rocket propulsion systems and a supplier
of military and commercial aircraft structures.

Supported by its HPC center used by
multiple business units across 12 US locations, ATK’s engineers and scientists
employ advanced CAE tools for a range of
complex design and simulation applications. ActiveStor delivers performance and massive scalable capacity for ATK’s design work flows,
including: combustion modeling, computational fluid dynamics, mechanical design
and flight simulation, all within a single, unified global namespace. Applications from software vendors such as CD-adapco, ANSYS, Inc. and Simulia are
optimized to work with Panasas storage, along with several in-house and
government lab codes.

"It
is crucial that ATK engineers use state-of-the art systems in order to support
our research and product design applications at the highest levels of
performance and uptime," said Ramesh Krishnan , senior staff engineer,
engineering process and tools at ATK Aerospace. "Panasas ActiveStor speeds our design and simulation processes, saving
us significant time and money."

The center previously managed its data via
a GPFS-based parallel file system, and while parallel computing ideally suits
ATK’s demanding storage workloads, GPFS performance and reliability issues led
ATK to explore alternative parallel architectures when it refreshed its Linux
cluster. Because ATK efficiently manages its large HPC cluster with a small,
dedicated support staff, performance, reliability, ease-of-use and
plug-and-play simplicity were key considerations.

"Panasas
balances ease-of-use, extreme performance, scalable capacity and workload
flexibility to deliver an ideal storage solution for commercial HPC
environments like ATK Aerospace," said Barbara Murphy, CMO at
Panasas. "By shortening time-to-design
and eliminating expensive physical modeling with high fidelity, computer-aided
simulation, Panasas customers realize significant cost benefits. In addition,
by delivering a highly reliable, high-performance storage platform, Panasas
ensures that engineers and scientists can focus on creating value, rather than
on cluster management."

"I
love Panasas storage because our users don’t even notice it’s there,"
said Nate Fuhriman, system administrator at ATK. "It’s what storage should be – something you don’t have to think about.
Regardless of how hard we push it, it just keeps doing what it’s supposed to."