Storage Solutions for Cray Supercomputer Deployed by DataDirect …

DataDirect Networks, Inc. has extended its alliance with Cray Inc., the supercomputer company, to feature the Storage Fusion Architecture from DataDirect Networks as a core component of its open-platform file storage strategy. The SFA10000 is the first of the next-generation DDN intelligent storage systems to be used in all of Cray’s high-end supercomputers, which now includes the new Cray XE6 supercomputer. To highlight the success of the DDN-Cray alliance, DDN is also announcing the selection of the SFA10000 for two marquee Cray supercomputing projects.

Next-Generation Petascale Climate Modeling System
To advance the state of computational climate modeling and research and to improve global weather forecasting capabilities, Cray has been selected by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to deliver a petascale HPC resource, called the NOAA Climate Modeling and Research System (CMRS). To support this leadership-class project, Cray has selected the DDN SFA10000 system storing more than 4.5 petabytes of data in a single Lustre file system. NOAA plans to extend this new Cray XE6 system over time to achieve over a petaflop of theoretical system performance, and it represents the fourth petascale system for which DDN technology has been selected.

Multi-Site Capabilities Refresh
for the U.S. Department of Defense
DDN has also aligned with Cray to greatly increase computational simulation capability for the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) High Performance Computing Modernization Program (HPCMO). DDN will provide the HPCMO with SFA10000 systems that provide a combined capacity of 7.3 PB of raw storage to serve as the high-performance foundation for several Lustre File Systems. The resources will be distributed across three HPCMO resource centers to support the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) located at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio; the Arctic Region Supercomputing Center (ARSC) in Fairbanks, Alaska; and the U.S. Army Engineer Research and Development Center (ERDC) in Vicksburg, Mississippi.

The award for the DoD MSRC refresh continues a long history that DDN has enjoyed with the DoD HPC Modernization Program. With a combined total of more than 400GB/s of aggregate peak SFA10000 bandwidth to be delivered, the DoD HPCMO will realize a substantially increased I/O capability to support the Cray XE6 systems they will support.

"Cray and DDN have always shared a unique, and mutual focus on the requirements of advanced computation," said Barry Bolding, Cray’s vice president of scalable systems. "Cray, more than any other company, can appreciate the unwavering focus DDN has placed on enabling open-platform, scalable I/O for the world’s most complex HPC environments. We are thrilled to reaffirm our close alliance with DDN to advance the state-of-the-art and deliver better resources to the computational scientist."

The DDN SFA10000, designed from the ground up to address the evolving data storage requirements of multi-core, scalable computation, delivers industry-leading capability of up to 12 GB/sec of read and write performance and over 1 million IOPS to handle any workload. With 60GB/s of fully-balanced, non-blocking internal bandwidth and the ability to manage up to 1,200 storage devices (HDD/SSD), the SFA10000 is three times more scalable than competing systems and optimized for online and nearline storage environments. HPC-optimized features include native parallel file system and application hosting, an active/active redundant design, high-speed mirrored cache, intelligent performance optimization, SATAssure data protection, fully-RAIDed drive enclosures and 8GB Fibre Channel and 40GB InfiniBand host-port options.

As recognition of this truly innovative design, HPCwire recently awarded DataDirect Networks with the 2009 Editor’s Choice Award for the Best HPC Storage Product.

"For a company focused on the pinnacle of HPC storage performance, there is no better validation of your technology than to be selected for use with leadership-class Cray systems," said John Josephakis, Vice President of High Performance Computing Sales, DDN. "The challenges of scalable HPC storage can be overlooked by other companies who capture the bulk of their business from the general purpose storage marketplace. This award is a validation of DDN’s ‘HPC-Purpose’ focus and will serve as a reference architecture for computational scientists who are working every day to ensure our safety and advance scientific understanding of complex phenomena."