CENTER FOR COMPUTATION & TECHNOLOGY

HPC Wire By HPC Wire staff Louisiana State University has leveraged the Panasas ActiveScale Storage Cluster and high-performance Linux clusters to conduct scientific research. The Panasas Storage Cluster has also been deployed at leading universities such as Stanford, Princeton, Carnegie-Mellon, Rockefeller and multiple campuses from the University of California system to support world-class scientific, bioscience, and computational research. The scientific efforts at these universities help gain a better understanding of the world around us, bring life-saving medicines to market faster, and improve the overall quality of peoples' lives. "Universities are deploying high-performance Linux clusters for research that has a profound and demonstrable impact on the world around us. Until now, complimentary storage solutions have created a performance bottleneck that limited cluster performance and ultimately slowed the research efforts," said Victor Perez, president and CEO of Panasas. "We understand the computing needs of the academic community and we welcome the opportunity to show other leading universities how our innovative storage solution can address their very stringent requirements." LSU's Center for Computation and Technology (CCT), which is housed at the Louisiana State University's Baton Rouge campus, has deployed 32 terabytes (TBs) of the Panasas Storage Cluster. By leveraging the Panasas ActiveScale File System and DirectFLOW client to deliver direct disk to cluster node access, researchers are able to manipulate very large data sets with an 8X performance increase over existing NFS servers. The Panasas system has also met LSU's scalability and management requirements, enabling LSU to deploy more capacity as network usage requires with no downtime for the users or degradation of cluster performance. "In terms of price/performance and total value, Panasas is the best storage solution we've found to meet the evolving needs of our HPC environment," said Brian D. Ropers-Huilman, assistant director, HPC and Computation Center for Computation & Technology at LSU. "With the Panasas solution we have significantly increased the speed with which we conduct our research projects, and maximized the overall productivity of our researchers."