Chinese Electric Automaker NIO Opts for Panasas ActiveStor Storage

Panasas, Inc. announced that NIO Limited, a Chinese electric vehicle manufacturer, has selected its ActiveStor storage technology to support the ongoing product design and development efforts of premium electric vehicles.

NIO delivered its first mainstream production car, the 7-seater ES8 electric SUV, in June 2018 in China. The ES8 features an onboard pilot system, an advanced autonomous driving assistant, and the first in-car AI system. NIO plans to launch its next vehicle, the 5-seater ES6 electric SUV in late 2018.

NIO deployed ActiveStor to create a storage environment capable of supporting manufacturing computer-aided engineering (CAE) vehicle design simulations using STAR-CCM+ and HyperWorks software, and crash simulation tests using LS-Dyna multi-physics simulation software.

“NIO updated its storage infrastructure with Panasas ActiveStor to accelerate the complex workflows associated with the design optimization and prototyping phase of our advanced electric cars,” said Zhijie Fang, HPC manager, NIO. “High-performance computing plays an essential role in our vehicle design process, and Panasas ActiveStor storage delivers the high performance and limitless scalability we need to manage and work with the large amount of data generated during our rigorous design simulation process.“

NIO rose to prominence in 2016 with the introduction of the EP9 (Electric Performance 9), the world’s fastest electric supercar. The EP9 holds the record for the fastest electric lap on the Nordschleife of the Nürburgring race track in Germany, the record for the fastest lap time for a production car with a driver at Circuit of the Americas (COTA) in Austin, TX, as well as the record for the fastest self-driving car at COTA.

“NIO is redefining the electric car ownership experience with vehicles that deliver the latest advancements in performance, safety and comfort, and we are thrilled to be their storage partner,” said Faye Pairman, president and CEO, Panasas. “HPC applications rely on high-performance storage, and our customers rely on us to provide a fast, flexible and easy-to-manage storage solution that drives business results.”

ActiveStor is an integrated, clustered scale-out NAS appliance that delivers the raw speed and enterprise-grade reliability required for compute-intensive and complex workflow environments. Its modular architecture includes customizable, flexible components that can adapt to meet dynamic business needs, allowing users to grow quickly and within budget.

ActiveStor is delivered as a plug-and-play solution that incorporates hybrid storage nodes containing flash and SATA media, the Panasas PanFS distributed parallel file system and the Panasas DirectFlow parallel data access protocol. Industry-standard NFS and SMB client protocols are also supported.

PanFS creates a single pool of storage under a filename space to support multiple applications and workflows in a single storage system with performance for technical applications. Metadata performance, data bandwidth, and data capacity scale independently for faster time to results.

DirectFlow avoids traditional protocol I/O bottlenecks by allowing compute clients to access each storage node directly and in parallel.

Meet Panasas at HPC China 2018, the national annual conference on HPC, held in Qingdao, China on October 18-20, 2018.