DDN NVMe Storage Selected by Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency

DDN (DataDirect Networks, Inc.) announced that the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) has selected DDN’s SFA200NVXE and SFA7990XE modular storage systems as infrastructure components for its new 19.4 TFLOPS HPC system TOKI-SORA, which went into operation in December 2020.

Built around Fujitsu’s FX1000 ARM-based architecture, JAXA’s TOKI-SORA will be targeted at advanced numerical simulation in the aeronautics and space area, large-scale data analytics and novel R&D applications. Combined with Fujitsu’s Lustre-based FEFS file system, the DDN systems will provide over 50PB of usable SSD and HDD storage capacity at a combined peak throughput of up to 1TB/s, which is over 7.5 times higher than the previous JSS2 system.

In order to support a range of applications with highly diverse I/O requirements, especially including data-intensive applications, JAXA had specified 20% of the total usable storage capacity for the new system to be delivered through DDN’s highly-balanced NVMe solution that will provide applications with extreme throughput and also with guaranteed operational performance and extreme IO/s. Additionally, DDN offers simple to deploy yet scalable NVMe storage solutions, helping file systems get up and running in no time.

The storage infrastructure for TOKI-SORA will combine 39 sets of SFA200NVXE systems, each with over 350TB of raw NVMe capacity, and with 14 SFA7990XE systems, each with over 4.2PB of raw HDD-based storage capacity.

“With the introduction of TOKI-SORA, we have implemented a HPC system that covers not only sequential access performance suitable for large-scale numerical simulations, but also high-performance I/O in fields such as data science,” said Naoyuki Fujita, manager, JAXA’s HPC division. “In the future, the system will support R&D needs in a wide range of fields from HPC to AI. In particular, high performance file I/O has become a requirement for HPCs in recent years, and we trust DDN’s storage to meet this demand.“

“This is an exciting project for DDN and another incredible collaboration with Fujitsu,” said Robert Triendl, GM, DDN. “Most importantly, it is a true honor to assist JAXA in its endeavor to broaden the appeal and usability of its advanced HPC infrastructure towards emerging application areas in big data, analytics, and AI. We look forward to seeing how TOKI-SORA contributes to further strengthening their international competitiveness in aerospace research in the field of conventional numerical simulation following Hayabusa2’s recent success.“