DDN Storage Innovations Enhance Performance and Reliability at Scale

“Today DDN announced a series of performance and reliability innovations across its storage appliances, aimed at meeting the growing demand for storage performance, simplicity and reliability at scale in a new era of data-centric computing. Infinite Memory Engine (IME) and Storage Fusion Architecture (SFA) product lines now feature significant new data protection and performance improvements that allow DDN customers to deploy a complete suite of storage services across even the most demanding emerging IoT, deep learning and technical HPC environments.”

Eric Barton Joins DDN as CTO for Software-Defined Storage

Today DDN appointed Eric Barton as the company’s chief technology officer for software-defined storage. In this role, Barton will lead the company’s strategic roadmap, technology architecture and product design for DDN’s newly created Infinite Memory Engine business unit. Barton brings with him more than 30 years of technology innovation, entrepreneurship and expertise in networking, distributed systems and storage software.

Top Weather and Climate Sites run on DDN Storage

“DDN’s unique ability to handle tough application I/O profiles at speed and scale gives weather and climate organizations the infrastructure they need for rapid, high-fidelity modeling,” said Laura Shepard, senior director of product marketing, DDN. “These capabilities are essential to DDN’s growing base of weather and climate organizations, which are at the forefront of scientific research and advancements – from whole climate atmospheric and oceanic modeling to hurricane and severe weather emergency preparedness to the use of revolutionary, new, high-resolution satellite imagery in weather forecasting.”

Future Technologies on the Rise for HPC

“2017 will see the introduction of many technologies that will help shape the future of HPC systems. Production-scale ARM supercomputers, advancements in memory and storage technology such as DDN’s Infinite Memory Engine (IME), and much wider adoption of accelerator technologies and from Nvidia, Intel and FPGA manufacturers such as Xilinx and Altera, are all helping to define the supercomputers of tomorrow.”

DDN IME Burst Buffer Exceeds 1 TB/s for Japan’s Fastest Supercomputer

“Storage performance has been one of the biggest challenges in developing supercomputers. To meet the demands for storage performance, IME was introduced to the Oakforest-PACS on a massive scale, the first such introduction in the world,” said Osamu Tatebe, lead, public relations, JCAHPC / professor, Center for Computational Sciences, University of Tsukuba. “We are very pleased that we could achieve effective I/O performance exceeding 1 TB per second in writing tens of thousands of processes to the same file. With this new storage technology, we believe that we will be able to contribute to society with the further development of computational science, big data analysis and machine learning.”

Podcast: Molly Rector from DDN on the Changing Face of HPC Storage

In this Graybeards Podcast, Molly Rector from DDN describes how HPC storage technologies are mainstreaming into the enterprise space. “In HPC there are 1000s of compute cores that are crunching on PB of data. For Oil&Gas companies, it’s seismic and wellhead analysis; with bio-informatics it’s genomic/proteomic analysis; and with financial services, it’s economic modeling/backtesting trading strategies. For today’s enterprises such as retailers, it’s customer activity analytics; for manufacturers, it’s machine sensor/log analysis; and for banks/financial institutions, it’s credit/financial viability assessments. Enterprise IT might not have 1000s of cores at their disposal just yet, but it’s not far off. Molly thinks one way to help enterprise IT is to provide a SuperComputer as a service (ScaaS?) offering, where top 10 supercomputers can be rented out by the hour, sort of like a supercomputing compute/data cloud.”

Video: Meet IME – The World’s First Burst Buffer

“DDN’s IME14K revolutionizes how information is saved and accessed by compute. IME software allows data to reside next to compute in a very fast, shared pool of non-volatile memory (NVM). This new data adjacency significantly reduces latency by allowing IME software’s revolutionary, fast data communication layer to pass data without the file locking contention inherent in today’s parallel file systems.”

Video: Early Evaluation of IME as a Burst Buffer and Application Accelerator

Dirk Pleiter from the Jülich Supercomputing Centre presented this talk at the DDN User Group at SC15. “IME unleashes a new I/O provisioning paradigm. This breakthrough, software defined storage application introduces a whole new new tier of transparent, extendable, non-volatile memory (NVM), that provides game-changing latency reduction and greater bandwidth and IOPS performance for the next generation of performance hungry scientific, analytic and big data applications – all while offering significantly greater economic and operational efficiency than today’s traditional disk-based and all flash array storage approaches that are currently used to scale performance.”

Video: DDN Infinite Memory Engine IME

Tommaso Cecchi from DDN presented this talk at the HPCAC Spain Conference. “IME unleashes a new I/O provisioning paradigm. This breakthrough, software defined storage application introduces a whole new new tier of transparent, extendable, non-volatile memory (NVM), that provides game-changing latency reduction and greater bandwidth and IOPS performance for the next generation of performance hungry scientific, analytic and big data applications – all while offering significantly greater economic and operational efficiency than today’s traditional disk-based and all flash array storage approaches that are currently used to scale performance.”

Video: Infinite Memory Engine (IME) Burst Buffer Experience at CSCS

Hussein Harake from CSCS presented this talk at the HPC Advisory Council Spain Conference. “IME unleashes a new I/O provisioning paradigm. This breakthrough, software defined storage application introduces a whole new new tier of transparent, extendable, non-volatile memory (NVM), that provides game-changing latency reduction and greater bandwidth and IOPS performance for the next generation of performance hungry scientific, analytic and big data applications – all while offering significantly greater economic and operational efficiency than today’s traditional disk-based and all flash array storage approaches that are currently used to scale performance.”