Texas Advanced Computing Center deploys 20PB Big Data hub

Since its founding in 2001, TACC has grown rapidly by enabling discoveries that advance science and society through the application of advanced computing technologies. With this growth, TACC also has seen its data explode by more than 40 percent year-on-year.

Now with TACC’s latest petascale HPC system in production, Stampede, and more new systems coming in 2013, the center needed a high performance storage solution that could connect all of TACC’s computing and visualization systems and scale seamlessly to anticipate research demands in the future. After a competitive review, TACC selected DDN for its price-performance and ability to scale the system 5x beyond the initial purchased configuration.

Building on recent DDN HPC wins such as Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Zuse Institute Berlin, this latest announcement with TACC reinforces that compute-intensive organizations around the world continue to validate DDN technology where total cost of ownership, scalability and performance are critical requirements.

Using DDN storage including SFA12K® and SFA7700 TM platforms and EXAScalerTM parallel file storage appliance, TACC has been able to significantly decrease power, energy usage and costs, while dramatically increasing its storage capacity as compared with its previous parallel file storage system.

Using the Lustre file system running on DDN storage servers, TACC increased its storage capacity and IO performance using an InfinibBand connected file system with more than 20PB in capacity that delivers more than 250GB/s+ in throughput to support nearly 10 petaflops (or 10 quadrillions calculations per second) of peak computing capability.

Using DDN Storage, TACC Data-Defined Datacenter Infrastructure Supports Critical Research Advances
With more than 120 staff and students, TACC operates several of the most powerful supercomputers and visualization systems in the world, and the network and data storage infrastructure to support them.

Stampede, among other HPC systems at TACC, provides the computing power for a variety of complex computational projects.

Researchers will use TACC computing resources powered by DDN storage to support research across several different fields including brain tumor imaging, black hole physics, and seismic hazard mapping. For example, researchers from the Southern California Earthquake Center (SCEC) are using Stampede to predict the frequency of damaging earthquakes in California for the latest Uniform California Earthquake Rupture Forecast (UCERT3) which forecasts the probability of all earthquakes throughout a region and over a specified time span. This data is incorporated into the U.S. Geological Survey's National Seismic Hazard Maps which are then used to set building codes and insurance rates.