Tokyo Institute of Technology Partnering With DDN on TSUBAME3.0 HPC

DataDirect Networks, Inc.(DDN) announced that the Tokyo Institute of Technology (Tokyo Tech) has selected the company as its strategic storage infrastructure provider for the TSUBAME3.0 super-computing system.

The design of the TSUBAME3.0 is a major step along an evolutionary path toward a convergence of data and compute. TSUBAME3.0 breaks with many of the conventions of the world’s top supercomputers, incorporating elements and design points from containerization, cloud, artificial intelligence (AI) and big data, and it exhibits innovation in the area of power consumption and system efficiency.

“As we run out the clock on Moore’s law, performance enhancements will increasingly be driven by improvements in data access times that come from faster storage media and networks, innovative data access approaches and the improvement of algorithms that interact with data subsystems,” said Satoshi Matsuoka, Professor, Ph.D., HPC systems group, GSIC, Tokyo Institute of Technology.

The IO infrastructure of TSUBAME3.0 combines fast in-node NVMe SSDs and a large, fast, Lustre-based system from the company. The 15.9PB Lustre parallel file system, composed of three of firm’s high-end ES14KX storage appliances, is rated at a peak performance of 150GB/s. The TSUBAME collaboration represents an evolutionary branch of HPC that could well develop into the dominant HPC paradigm at about the time the most advanced super-computing nations and consortia achieve exascale computing.

DDN and Tokyo Tech have worked together, starting with TSUBAME2.0, the previous generation supercomputer at Tokyo Tech, which debuted in the #4 spot on the Top500 and was certified as ‘the Greenest Production Supercomputer in the World.’

“Our collaboration with Tokyo Tech began more than six years ago and has spanned several implementations of the TSUBAME system,” said Robert Triendl, SVP, global sales, marketing and field services, DDN. “What is exciting about working with Satoshi and his team is the clear vision of advancing research computing from systems that support tightly-coupled simulations toward a new generation of data-centric infrastructures for the future of research big data but also AI and machine learning.“

Operated by the Global Scientific Information and Computing Center at Tokyo Tech, the TSUBAME systems are used by a variety of scientific disciplines and a wide-ranging community of users. Tokyo Tech researchers – professors and students – are the top users of the system, followed by industrial users, foreign researchers and external researchers working in collaboration with Tokyo Tech professors.

“Tokyo Tech is very pleased with our DDN solution and long-term partnership, and we are looking forward to teaming with DDN on future storage technologies for new application areas, such as graph computing and machine learning,” added Matsuoka.