INDUSTRY

YottaYotta, the High Performance Netstorage Company, announced today that Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) has selected the GSX 3000 for the Data Intensive Computing Environment (DICE) program to enable high performance global data sharing across Department of Defense (DoD), Department of Energy (DOE), and NASA facilities. The GSX 3000 will be deployed at Wright-Patterson's Aeronautical Systems Center Major Shared Resource Center (ASC MSRC) in Dayton Ohio, the Ohio Supercomputer Center (OSC) in Springfield Ohio, and NASA Goddard in Greenbelt Maryland. The DICE program is a new approach to investigating technology solutions that can address the challenges associated with the creation and use of large quantities of data across geographically distributed agencies over real-world wide area networks. The concept originated at the ASC MSRC, who named the Advanced Virtual Engine Test Cell (AVETeC) Inc. as the Principal Investigator, and CSC as the manager and integrator of the DICE program. DICE provides a multi-agency environment aimed at reducing the time-to-solution for complex data intensive problems in a diverse geographical setting. YottaYotta's GSX 3000 offers a suite of Global Block Services that sets a new standard for high-performance, resilient global data sharing and fully-active business continuity, also known as continuity of operations (COOP). The GSX 3000 NetStorage Control Node opens up new approaches to managing and implementing critical storage applications, including transparent multi-site data sharing, fully-active site-aware geographic access, heterogeneous RAID, continuous-access data migration and consolidation, and high-speed data transport. The result is optimization of distributed IT resources, improved distributed data processing performance, reduced time-to-solution for data-intensive workflows, and high performance global data access and distribution with reduced WAN traffic. The DICE program's compute environment must accommodate a variety of users from different agencies across multiple disparate locations - each with varying demands on the storage and network infrastructure. A typical high performance computing (HPC) setting can have many disparate user groups producing massive amounts of data to solve complex and interdisciplinary problems. "A critical challenge is to effectively manage the data across multiple geographically distributed centers, while improving accessibility and avoiding the typical delays associated with remote I/O or file transfer," said Donna Klecka, Program Manager for CSC's High Performance Computing Center of Excellence. "We look forward to deploying YottaYotta's GSX 3000 across DICE's facilities in order to tackle these challenges." "The DICE program is a customer environment with high performance data sharing, access, and distribution requirements that far exceed what is currently offered by traditional storage networking solutions or newer wide area file sharing approaches," said Jack Kurtz, Vice President of Business Development at YottaYotta. "With the GSX 3000, users across the DICE environment are provided with read and write access to a single shared data image - while minimizing WAN traffic and avoiding the performance penalties of transporting data across distance. In effect, YottaYotta can enable disparate server and storage resources at the DoD, DOE, and NASA to operate as if they were all in the same room."