This week at SC12, DDN announced a $100 million investment in its research and development efforts, specifically directed at resolving key challenges to achieving Exascale levels of performance in scientific computing. The new investments by DDN represent a substantial percentage of DDN’s engineering resources and will be directed toward technology challenges, which become critical at Exascale proportions, including: I/O Acceleration; Converged Infrastructure; Information Value Extraction; and Energy and Data Center Efficiency.
Data-intensive computing impacts individuals, organizations, industries and governments by enabling the creation of valuable information based on massive volumes of highly complex data,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and cofounder, DDN. “Significant investment is required to allow researchers to address challenges such as the design of new materials needed for better electric car batteries, the improvement of multi-physics models for more accurate severe weather modeling, and the development of high-resolution cosmological simulations to help understand dark matter and the universe around us. With today’s announcement, DDN is establishing a clear direction for our Exascale computing agenda and reaffirms DDN’s continued central role in the future of supercomputing.”
DDN disclosed that the investments will center around the following critical technologies for Exascale computing:
- I/O Acceleration: New file system, middleware and storage tiering methods will be required to eliminate scalability barriers associated with conventional methods of file, object and database access in order to achieve 1,000x scalability, TB/s performance and million-way application CPU parallelism.
- Converged Infrastructure: The convergence of computing, storage and networking technologies will give rise to intelligent and accelerated data storage infrastructures which can co-locate pre-processing and post-processing routines natively within the storage infrastructure to enable applications to access data with increased acuity.
- Information Value Extraction: Leveraging converged infrastructures, DDN R&D efforts will support the development of scalable data analytics environments to extract actionable insights from vast volumes of unstructured data.
- Energy and Data Center Efficiency: With the emergence of storage-class memory and software tools, infrastructures can be built with fewer components compared to today’s disk-based technologies. These initiatives will serve to significantly reduce hardware acquisition costs but will also make data centers much more space and power efficient by reducing storage footprint by more than 75%.
This is exciting news for the HPC community looking to see more vendors step up to the plate for the incredibly daunting goal of Exascale computing within this decade. I can tell you that the DDN booth was packed with people all week at SC12. Read the Full Story.
Over at Scientific Computing World, Tom Wilkie writes that SC12 was all about science.
