CHATSWORTH, CA — (Marketwire) — 08/05/11 — DataDirect Networks (DDN), the world-s largest privately-held information storage company, today announced it was selected to provide the high-performance storage infrastructure for the International Fusion Energy Research Center (IFERC), an international nuclear fusion facility researching the use of fusion for the production of electricity — a safe, inexhaustible, and environmentally responsible energy source that could resolve the world-s escalating energy needs.
“Simulation codes in plasma physics — a key to demonstrating fusion power is a viable and sustainable energy source — produce vast amounts of data and require extreme I/O performance and scalability,” said Francois Robin of CEA, the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission. “DDN-s Storage Fusion Architecture, in combination with the Lustre file system, has the performance, scalability, and data integrity features necessary to process, generate and use massive amounts of data without creating bottlenecks.”
CEA has been mandated by F4E(1) for the construction and operation with JAEA (Japan Atomic Energy Agency) of the computing center for IFERC. The DDN-supported supercomputer system will be located in Rokkasho, Japan (Aomori Prefecture), and will be made available to more than 1,000 European and Japanese fusion energy researchers.
The IFERC supercomputer is being developed by DDN partner Bull, a European leader in mission-critical digital information technology systems.
“With computational power at peak performance exceeding 1.3 petaflops — more than one quadrillion (10(15)) mathematical operations per second, the supercomputer we have designed for IFERC will be one of the most powerful computing systems in the world,” said Pascal Barbolosi, Vice-President, Extreme Computing at Bull. “We have selected DDN because we know we can draw on our joint experience in the high performance computing market to provide a big data storage architecture that could not be developed with conventional storage technology.”
“We are proud that DDN technology will be used to enable a solution that can bring the international research community closer to developing and producing clean, safe, sustainable nuclear power,” said John Josephakis, DDN Sr. Vice President, HPC Worldwide Sales. “The challenge before IFERC is nothing less than solving humanity-s energy crisis. By supporting over a quadrillion operations a second, DDN-s scalable data infrastructure provides the extreme levels of performance, capacity, and data integrity required to manage large scientific datasets and perform complex plasma physics calculations.”
Once complete, the IFERC supercomputer will include:
High performance DDN SFA10000 systems
More than 18.7 petabytes (PB) of disk storage
Over 120GB/s Lustre File System performance
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is the world-s largest privately held information storage company. We are the leading provider of data storage and processing solutions and services, that enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver results from their information. Our customers include the world-s leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, media production organizations and security & intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN-s solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world-s most scalable data centers, to ensure competitive business advantage for today-s information powered enterprise.
(1) F4E, Fusion For Energy, European “domestic” agency for the construction of ITER and the “Broader Approach.”
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