DDN Invests $100 Million Investment In Exascale Computing R&D

Data Direct
Networks, Inc announced
the establishment of a $100,000,000 investment in its R&D efforts to
achievie Exascale levels of performance in scientific computing.

"Data-intensive
computing impacts individuals, organizations, industries and governments by
enabling the creation of valuable information based on massive volumes of
highly complex data," said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DDN.
"Significant investment is required
to allow researchers to address challenges such as the design of new materials
needed for better electric car batteries, the improvement of multi-physics
models for more accurate severe weather modeling, and the development of
high-resolution cosmological simulations to help understand dark matter and the
universe around us. With today’s announcement, DDN is establishing a clear
direction for our Exascale computing agenda and reaffirms DDN’s continued
central role in the future of supercomputing."

Exascale computing refers to a computer
system capable of reaching performance exceeding one quintillion computer
operations per second. This level of computing capability is expected to arrive
around 2018 and will represent a thousandfold increase over current technology. To achieve this level of scalability, it is understood that radical innovation will be required to ensure
applications can scale across massive infrastructure
that is highly resilient, power efficient and affordable.

Powering over 60 of the world’s top 100
supercomputers (as ranked by the June 2012 Top500 list), DDN is at the
forefront of supercomputing and big data storage scaling efforts.

"With
its investment in Exascale, DDN is signaling its intention to remain at the
leading edge of HPC," said Addison Snell, CEO of Intersect360 Research, Inc. "HPC technologies are starting to become
mainstream with the advent of big data, and now there is huge market incentive
for HPC leaders like DDN to develop next-generation technologies for scalable
and efficient data-intensive computing."

The new investments by DDN represent a substantial percentage of DDN’s
engineering resources and will be directed towards technology challenges which
become critical at Exascale proportions, including:

• I/O
  Acceleration: New file system, middleware and
  storage tiering methods will be required to eliminate scalability barriers
  associated with conventional methods of file, object and database access in
  order to achieve 1,000x scalability, TB/s performance and million-way application
  CPU parallelism.
• Converged
  Infrastructure: The convergence of computing,
  storage and networking technologies will give rise to intelligent and
  accelerated data storage infrastructures which can co-locate pre-processing and
  post-processing routines natively within the storage infrastructure to enable
  applications to access data with increased acuity.
• Information
  Value Extraction: Leveraging converged
  infrastructures, DDN R&D efforts will support the development of scalable
  data analytics environments to extract actionable insights from vast volumes of
  unstructured data.
• Energy
  and Data Center Efficiency: With the emergence of
  storage-class memory and software tools, infrastructures can be built with
  fewer components compared to today’s disk-based technologies. These initiatives
  will serve to reduce hardware acquisition costs but will also make data centers
  much more space and power efficient by reducing storage footprint by more than
  75%.

DDN discussed its
Exascale agenda at SC12, the International Conference for HPC, Networking,
Storage and Analysis in Salt Lake City, UT last November 12-15.