Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education at Vanderbilt University Selecting Spectra Logic

Supercomputing research environments in universities must often accommodate different user needs, navigating the storage requirements of not only departments and researchers across campus, but also meeting the standards of external partners and industry collaborators.

This is certainly the case for the Advanced Computing Center for Research and Education (ACCRE) at Vanderbilt University, the foremost resource for the HPC requirements of the various research teams and grant projects across the Vanderbilt community. Over 50 departments and more than 850 researchers turn to ACCRE for a multitude of services, from utilizing their big data cluster, to leveraging their large high-bandwidth distributed storage network, to employing their tape backup services.

“Researchers at Vanderbilt are generating massive amounts of invaluable data, both within the university and through external partnerships, that must be stored and protected forever,” said Brian Grainger, chief sales officer, Spectra Logic Corporation.

The ACCRE cluster, housing over 10,000 computational cores and 10PB of disk storage, was designed to accommodate different user needs while leaving room for expansion. To preserve the data of the many collaborators and researchers leveraging their archival storage, ACCRE needed to increase storage capacity.

Why Spectra?
ACCRE deployed a Spectra T950 Tape Library and Spectra BlackPearl Converged Storage System to store and archive research data. Due to expected growth estimated to reach 10PB by the end of 2018, and higher by 2020, the center upgraded their previous tape system to a Spectra tape library, which offers storage density and minimal footprint. The library better accommodated their nightly backups and increasing need for data capacity while simultaneously meeting new security requirements instituted for Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) to protect grant research data.

The center also deployed a Spectra Black Pearl Converged Storage System, an object storage platform that eliminates the need for costly third-party data movers through its integration of Spectra S3 with a range of certified clients and simple file movers. The BlackPearl enabled direct end user access to archival storage and created a predictable and flattened cost model as they scale.

ACCRE’s case study is an interesting story of a university’s supercomputing center making all the right technical decisions to capitalize on their research computing infrastructure to optimize the community’s use of shared resources, expedite time to discovery, and maximize revenue generating opportunities.

Spectra will have a booth at SuperComputing 2018 in Dallas, TX, from November, 12-15.