Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Selects DDN and Aspen Systems

DDN (DataDirect Networks, Inc.) and Aspen Systems, Inc., have partnered to deliver custom AI and HPC solutions that enable data-intensive organizations to generate more value and lower times for analyzing data, on premise and in the cloud.

As datasets continue to dynamically grow in size, organizations require personalized HPC solutions that are quick to deploy and easy to use to facilitate complex projects and generate faster time to results.

“Aspen Systems is passionate about the latest technologies that relate to our industry, and our clients value us for our precision craftsmanship and expert support,” said Mako Furukawa, senior sales engineer, Aspen. “The need to provide high-speed parallel storage to our customers drove the partnership with DDN over a decade ago. DDN is an excellent partner for us because of their technical knowledge, ongoing customer preference for their solutions as well as their depth of understanding customers’ complex requirements.“

The two partners serve a breadth of organizations that conduct various forms of computational science research, including government agencies, higher education, aerospace, and automotive to pharmacology, psychology and biology. Each customers’ needs are varied and have specific requirements to fulfill in their architectural design. Aspen’s engineers have over 100 years of combined experience in the direct HPC cluster marketspace. Together with DDN, they are able to work directly with customers to provide cost optimization and utilization from the cluster to meet the needs of their workload requirements.

This industry expertise may be one of the reasons why Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) recently selected te two vendor’s solutions to fuel its Coastal Observations, Mechanisms, and Predictions Across Systems and Scales (COMPASS) project. The project comprises of a field study and a coastal modeling study and will help enhance the predictive understanding of coastal systems, including their response to short-term and long-term changes.

“Aspen Systems has the knowledge base to design a custom HPC solution around unique computing requirements, and DDN has the expertise to help customers manage at scale data better, faster and safer, today and in the future,” said Jeff Jordan, VP of federal sales, DDN. “Together, our goal is to provide our customers a premium end-to-end solution with the best performance for any application that allows customers to concentrate on what’s most important, their research.“

DDN’s Intelligent Infrastructure solution portfolio including its A³I solutions, EXAScaler parallel filesystems, and Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) appliances, ensure that Aspen can meet the requirements of the most demanding projects by allowing data to be stored efficiently. No matter the size or complexity of the workload, DDN’s solutions are meant to scale to meet any organizations’ needs.