DDN Delivers Site-Wide File System to Los Alamos National Laboratory

Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has selected high-performance storage from DataDirect Networks, Inc. (DDN) to support its Institutional Computing program, which encompasses a range of unclassified, collaborative scientific efforts, including the study of biology, earth science, physics, oceans and cosmology.

In fulfilling the program’s mission to provide open and equal access to HPC resources to every LANL scientist and engineer, as well as research colleagues around the world, the institution provides nearly 70,000 computing cores and more than a petaflop of processing power.

To bolster its environment for multidisciplinary application simulations while supporting existing and future cluster architectures within institutional computing, LANL sought a high-throughput, scalable and reliable single site-wide system that represented overall value.

LANL selected DDN Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA)

• high-performance storage and DDN’s EXAScaler Lustre file system
• appliance to meet the compute-intensive demands of 11 separate computing
• clusters by delivering 4.3PBs of storage capacity and up to 40Gb/s I/O performance via the Lustre file system.

DDN currently powers over two-thirds of the world’s 100 fastest supercomputers.

Storage Performance, Reliability and Flexibility Improving Scientific Research
With DDN storage, LANL will be able to store, access and share massive amounts of data among its diverse and distributed community of scientists and researchers while having the flexibility to connect to different HPC platforms across its common environment.

DDN SFA12K-40 supports nearly 1.7 million IO/s to cache and 1.4 million IO/s to disk, depending on the disk configuration; the system has a maximum capacity of 1,680 SATA, SAS and/or SSD disk drives in three racks.

The SFA high-performance storage-based EXAScaler Lustre file system appliance will be able to accommodate LANL’s requirements, ranging from small compute tasks to large compute demands spanning tens of thousands of computing cores in parallel.

Bob Tomlinson, institutional computing program manager, Los Alamos National Laboratory, said: “In supporting LANL’s broad range of scientific computing projects, it’s imperative that our scientists, researchers and colleagues have instant access to the data they need to analyze results and improve scientific outcomes. With DDN’s high-performance storage and site-wide file system approach, LANL will be equipped to support our compute-intensive demands both now and in the future.”

Jeff Denworth, VP marketing, DDN, said: “DDN is extremely pleased to provide Los Alamos National Laboratory with a high-throughput, scalable file and storage subsystem, which will enable taking advantage of the highest levels of storage performance, reliability and scalability to ensure fast and efficient data access and sharing while accelerating scientific discoveries.“