Italy’s Cineca Acquired DataDirect SFA10000

DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) announced that CINECA, Italy’s largest computing center and scientific research consortium, has selected DDN’s Storage Fusion Architecture 10000 (SFA10000) and IBM’s General Parallel File System (GPFS) to power academic and commercial research across the European Union in such fields as computational science, life science and chemistry, and material science.

The new PLX-GPU supercomputer introduced in June 2011 by SCS S.r.l – SuperComputing Solutions and CINECA is the fastest supercomputer available today to Italian industrial and public researchers. It is ranked at the 54th position in the top500 (as July 2011), the list of the most powerful supercomputers in the world.

"To satisfy the demanding and highly varied requirements of the academic and commercial research community, CINECA needs a highly-efficient and highly-versatile storage infrastructure. Our new DDN SFA10000 storage cluster with GPFS will deliver a 10-fold increase in site-wide resources and readies us for the ever-evolving needs of our most demanding applications," said Sanzio Bassini, Director of Supercomputing Application & Innovation at CINECA. "Our long-standing partnership with DDN and IBM helps us eliminate I/O bottlenecks and enable a level of scalability that is unachievable with conventional technologies."

"We are honored to be powering Italy’s largest computing center and helping CINECA achieve significant performance improvements," said Paul Bloch, President, DDN. "The world-leading performance, density and scalability of the SFA10000 will ensure that CINECA can provide the highest-level of computing resources possible, and meet the growing demands of its academic and commercial clients."

To find the right system, CINECA and Eni conducted a comprehensive market survey before selecting DDN and IBM. The decision is part of a long-standing collaboration between CINECA, DDN, and IBM, focusing on advancing dynamic, scalable, data-intensive computing for such important customers as Eni. The system will be delivered and maintained by IBM Italy.

CINECA is a non-profit partnership of 50 Italian universities and is the country’s largest academic research consortium. It will be using the DDN-powered system to accelerate data-driven scientific discovery and improve geophysical exploration for Eni S.p.A, the global oil and gas conglomerate and Italy’s largest industrial company.

CINECA also is part of The Partnership for Advanced Computing in Europe, PRACE, a pan-European research initiative for HPC that is funded in part by the EU’s 7th Framework Program. By adding a SFA10000 to its arsenal, CINECA joins other PRACE members that have also deployed DDN SFA technology to power their parallel HPC file storage initiatives, including GENCI (France), CSCS (Switzerland) and FZJ (Germany).