EARTH SCIENCES

DataDirect Networks Inc., a leading provider of scalable storage systems for performance and capacity-driven applications, announced it has once again expanded its position as the leading supplier of high performance storage systems to the world’s fastest supercomputers, powering the fastest and second fastest computers, six of the top 10 and forty of the top 100 fastest clusters in the world. The 29th edition of the TOP500 list, released on November 12th, ranks the fastest supercomputing clusters around the world. Of the top 100, more are powered by DataDirect Networks’ high performance S2A storage solutions than by any other storage vendor. The company has continued to expand its leadership in storage for high performance computing, gaining many new systems on the list since its last publication in June of this year. DataDirect Network’s S2A storage systems now power six of the top 10, 30 of the top 50, and 40 of the top 100 fastest machines in the world. The new TOP500 list, which was released during the Supercomputing Conference (SC07) in Reno, Nevada, can be found at www.top500.org. DataDirect Networks’ growth and acceptance in the HPC community is driven by its unrivaled Silicon Storage Architecture (S2A) technology. On November 13, 2007, DataDirect Networks unveiled the S2A9900 StorageScaler, the company’s eighth-generation S2A appliance and storage system that scales performance and capacity to new heights by delivering sustained bandwidth of up to 6GB/s per appliance and enabling storage systems to scale beyond 250GB/s in total throughput between host computers and the disk drives. This level of performance is eight times that of competitive technology and allows companies to put their data to work at a moment's notice. DataDirect’s S2A Storage Appliances power major installations including BlueGene/L, a National Nuclear Security Administration system at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, Sandia National Laboratories, the New York Center for Computational Science, NASA, Atomic Weapons Establishment, Caltech, Cambridge University, NCSA, University of Edinburgh, Swiss Scientific Computing Center (CSCS), US Army Research Laboratory (ARL), UCSD, CINECA, Indiana University and the University of North Carolina among others. The high performance of DataDirect Networks’ S2A storage appliances opens new windows for scientific discovery, allowing more complex and detailed computer simulations to be run. These simulations can require in excess of 300 terabytes of storage space for a single iteration, and their checkpoint operations (where the computer pauses calculations in order to write system restore data to disks to protect the run in the event of an application crash) can consume over 100GB/second of storage system bandwidth. "We are very proud that our Silicon Storage Architecture is being utilized by so many of the TOP500 supercomputers,” said Alex Bouzari, CEO and co-founder of DataDirect Networks. “We’ve always believed the technology gives our customers a distinct performance and capacity advantage, as it was built from the ground up to handle the world’s most demanding applications and nothing is more demanding than the systems on the TOP500 list.” The TOP500 list is published every June and November and compiled by Hans Meuer of the University of Mannheim, Germany; Erich Strohmaier and Horst Simon of NERSC/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory; and Jack Dongarra of the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.