Academia Sinica Chooses Infortrend Storage for HPC Application 

Academia Sinica, Taiwan’s most preeminent academic institution, was founded in 1928 to undertake scholarly research in various fields, including mathematical, physical, and life sciences. The research data for these scientific projects requires massive storage capacity and high storage performance for processing HPC workloads. The existing storage environment was no longer capable to satisfy growing demands of the research institution as it had poor performance not suitable to conduct smooth HPC analysis, didn’t provide enough capacity for quickly growing research data, and was not easy to manage. Moreover, IT server room had limited rack space to install a new storage system. Thus, the institution was looking for a storage solution capable to successfully resolve the aforementioned challenges.

Academia Sinica chose Infortrend’s unified SAN/NAS EonStor GS 3000 storage to provide a basis for numeric prediction system for research needs. The set of research software does a computer model simulation and prediction of the collected data. The observation models are based on massive amounts of new observations from field sensors and rely heavily on the provided computing resources. GS 3000 Gen2 (60pcs x 12TB NL-SAS fully loaded) perfectly fits for this demanding application by providing 4,000MB/s write speed for ingesting research data and 8,000MB/s read speed for conducting research high-performance computing. IT personnel easily installed GS in the limited rack space and connected to the network via 4*16Gb FC host interface. To eliminate management burden, GS provides an intuitive browser-based GUI EonOne.

“Capacity requirement for researchers’ data grows very fast. And Infortrend provides the best price/performance for scaling up,” said IT specialist of Academia Sinica.