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Breaking News - Storage:

DataDirect SwiftCluster Combines Fibre Channel, 10GigE

DataDirect Networks, a leading provider of networked storage and cluster solutions for HPC, is demonstrating a high performance Fibre Channel and GigE/10GigE SwiftCluster running Lustre, on the ASCI booth No. 3023 at the fourth annual High Performance Bandwidth Challenge held at SC2003 in Phoenix.

Architected in collaboration with Lawrence Livermore National Labs, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications and the San Diego Supercomputer Center, DataDirect's SwiftCluster is comprised of four DataDirect S2A8000 RAID controllers with 21TB of storage, 32 OST servers powered by dual Intel Xeon 3.2 GHz processors, 16 compute nodes equipped with 10 GigE network cards and Foundry Networks switches.

Optimized for use with the Lustre global parallel file system, DataDirect's SwiftCluster is also connected via a wide area network to the San Diego Supercomputer Center and the National Center for Supercomputing Applications.

"We have demanding I/O requirements for next-generation scalable file system components," Mark Seager, deputy department head of advanced technology at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, said. "We need a device that provides us with the ability to share data between multiple clusters at native file system speeds that scale with the size of the application."

"We are very excited to have delivered and installed tens of teraflops and hundreds of terabytes of SwiftCluster-based storage networking to our valued HPC customers since the beginning of the year," said Alex Bouzari, CEO of DataDirect Networks. "DataDirect's SwiftCluster breakthrough architecture achieves its goal of delivering highly scalable data processing and very low latency with an extremely attractive price point."

"DataDirect has combined their leading storage controller technology with the Lustre storage architecture," said Dr. Peter J. Braam, president and chief technology officer of Cluster File Systems Inc. "With SwiftCluster, they are delivering an integrated solution showing the highest scalability and performance of Lustre in production environments."

DataDirect S2A and SwiftCluster customers in the HPC space include Lawrence Livermore National Labs, Sandia National Labs, NCSA, NASA Goddard, Lawrence Berkeley National Labs, Argonne National Laboratory, U.S. Army Research Lab, NOAA Forecast Systems Lab, NCAR and DKRZ.