Zuse Institute Berlin Taps DDN and Cray

Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB), a research
institute for applied mathematics and computer science, will use DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) in partnership
with Cray Inc. as the foundation for its big data analytics and scientific
research infrastructure for the HLRN supercomputer.

ZIB will use DDN technology to perform massive scientific simulations,
mathematical computations and analytics to accelerate research spanning the
fields of physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics, engineering and the environment.

With research driven by the principle of Math, Computation & Data at
Work, ZIB supports scientific projects conducted by several hundred
academic and government researchers who share access to distributed
supercomputing resources in Berlin and Hannover, Germany, as part of the HLRN alliance.
 

Given the range of data intensive applications and concurrent computations
performed by the institute, HLRN required a big data solution that could
deliver a significant increase in storage capacity, and also scale bandwidth
and performance of its storage.

According to ZIB, DDN’s HPC portfolio, including the SFA12K storage platform
and GRIDScaler Parallel File Storage Appliance, outperformed competitive
solutions in I/O price/performance ratio.

Using the file storage technology from DDN, HLRN applications will
be able to achieve an overall aggregate bandwidth performance of more than 50GB/s,
which will represent a 3.6x improvement in performance over its previously
deployed system. As a result, ZIB will be positioned to expand its
scientific research while also embarking on new research that requires
high-bandwidth access to extremely large data sets.

ZIB works in close cooperation with partners from science, economy and society
to develop mathematical models and efficient algorithms.

DDN delivers capacity-based scale and performance

Over the past two years, ZIB experienced a major surge in big data growth,
which drove the need for greater disk capacity and bandwidth for rapid access
to large scale datasets. The SFA12K, deployed with DDN
GRIDScaler parallel file system, serves as the backbone for the HLRN-III
peta-scale computing resource, ensuring the optimal balance between compute
power and storage bandwidth.

With DDN’s policy-driven snapshots, ZIB meets a crucial requirement for
providing an extra measure of protection against accidental data deletion, data
corruption or viruses.

ZIB also is impressed with DDN’s ability to reduce energy consumption by
eliminating unnecessary storage enclosures, switches, fans and power supplies
to help reduce data center, power and cooling requirements for lowered TCO.

Working in partnership with Cray to deploy the system, DDN will assist ZIB
in migrating up to 1.6PB of vital HLRN project data, encompassing up to 800TB
at each HLRN production site, while providing ample capacity to scale its
storage system to 40PB as future needs dictate without having to add more
components.

Dr. Thomas Steinke, leader of the supercomputing algorithms and consultancy
group, ZIB, said: "As a research
institute focused on mathematics and computer science and resource provider in
the HLRN alliance, it’s crucial for us to balance compute power and storage
bandwidth, which isn’t easy. With its installation, DDN will deliver an
exceptional improvement in bandwidth performance over our current system while
also outranking the competing solutions in terms of price/performance. With DDN technology, ZIB will be
able to increase storage bandwidth and performance to enable more modeling and
simulations, as well as apply cutting-edge algorithms to answer new questions
that can lead to major scientific breakthroughs."