Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology Adopts DDN

DDN (DataDirect Networks, Inc.) AI focused storage solution EXAScaler, has been adopted as the dedicated storage of the HPC system AI Bridging Green Cloud Infrastructure, which is currently being developed between Japan’s National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology (AIST) and Fujitsu Ltd.

AIST’s green cloud infrastructure expands the existing AI Bridging Cloud Infrastructure (ABCI), which was provided by Fujitsu and has been in operation since August 1, 2018, and is scheduled to start operations in early 2021. More than 1,000 users, from AI start-ups to electronics manufacturers, have been conducting R&D using the current system. Faced with growth in demand for AI R&D in recent years in industry, government and academia, AIST has decided to add the AI Bridging Green Cloud Infrastructure in collaboration with ABCI. The concept is to operate both systems in an integrated manner.

The storage environment, which will be used on both systems, consists of an 11.2PB storage system based on DDN’s EXAScaler parallel file system solution which is is based on open-source Lustre adopted by many HPC systems and large-scale AI computing infrastructure projects, both domestically and internationally.

At storage vendor to widely adopt the open-source Lustre file system, DDN acquired the Lustre development division from Intel in 2018 and has since focused on optimizing Lustre for modern applications in data analytics and AI. In addition to maintaining the Lustre source code tree, it is also the main contributor to the Lustre source code.

The DDN storage system selected for the AI Bridging Green Cloud Infrastructure comprises 3 DDN 400NVX units with 405.5TB of effective data capacity, and uses NVMe SSDs, as well as DDN ES7990X units with large-capacity HDDs for a total 10.8PB of usable data capacity. The high-speed data pool will deliver an effective write throughput of 105GB/s, with read throughput of over 120GB/s, and over 4 million random read file IO/s, while the capacity area is expected to deliver an effective throughput of at least 60GB/s.

“DDN’s EXAScaler is a proven solution that has been delivering high-performance file systems for large HPC environments for some time now. Over the past few years, DDN has invested heavily in development related to the Lustre file system, working closely with GPU vendors such as NVIDIA to optimize Lustre for a variety of data analytics, ML and AI workloads,” said Shuichi Ihara, principal engineer working mainly on performance improvements, Whamcloud, which is responsible for developing DDN’s Lustre-based EXAScaler file system solution. “We are honored to be selected by AIST as the main storage provider for Japan’s national AI infrastructure, built by AIST in collaboration with industry, academia and government. We are excited to be able to contribute to the development of AI R&D in Japan together with AIST and Fujitsu.“