Panasas With Dell

Panasas, Inc. has partnered with Dell to deliver an integrated, high-performance, clustered computing solution for the life sciences research community. The solution, an optimized combination of Dell PowerEdge M610 blade servers based on the latest Intel Xeon processor 5500 series architecture, and high-performance Panasas ActiveStor storage, combines a dense, highly scalable solution with the ease-of-setup and use that will improve the productivity and efficiency of scientists in all disciplines of life sciences research. The new solution was showcased at the Bio-IT World Conference & Expo ’09 in Boston during April 27-29.

"Our life sciences customers rely on Dell because we take the complexity out of research technology deployments. They care about faster simulations and time to results," said August Calhoun, vice president of Dell Life Sciences. "After joint analysis, testing and benchmarks with Panasas, together we are bringing to market an integrated, turnkey BLAST solution with industry-leading performance and management simplicity."

"The life science market is one of the fastest growing segments of the technical computing market and now exceeds $1.5 billion in yearly server purchases," said Earl Joseph, HPC program vice president, IDC. "In order to maintain the fast pace of new drug discovery and compete effectively, life sciences industry and research organizations will likely welcome a turnkey solution from Dell and Panasas. A turnkey solution like this allows scientists to spend more of their time doing their core science and not ‘wasting’ time trying to get their HPC system up and running."

Base configurations of the integrated cluster solution consist of clustered Dell server nodes and two shelves of Panasas ActiveStor storage, connected together with a 1Gbit/second network switch in a half-height rack unit. The solution is fully supported with a Dell 3-year customer service agreement. Configurations can be custom designed for workloads in life science disciplines such as bioinformatics sequence analysis and alignment, in-silico molecular docking for drug discovery, molecular dynamics for protein structure predictions, and ab-initio quantum mechanics, among others.

"In the Dell benchmark lab, we conducted performance scalability studies of Basic Local Alignment Search Tool (BLAST), and were able to launch over 2000 searches per hour from a 512-core Dell PowerEdge HPC cluster with one Panasas system, delivering throughput 7 to 10 times higher than the same cluster with a conventional NFS server," added Larry Jones, VP marketing, Panasas. "Functional testing has also been completed on a wide variety of commercially available and open-source scientific applications in order to deliver the faster time to results that life sciences customers need to achieve new breakthroughs."