-- Continuing to build on the company's unparalleled leadership in HPC
innovation, at this year's SC14, DataDirect Networks (DDN) is revealing
broad customer adoption and latest performance testing of its Infinite
Memory Engine (IME(TM)) burst buffer and application acceleration
technology.
-- Ideal for a broad range of performance-hungry HPC applications, such as
real-time analytic processing and modeling of Big Data across Life
Sciences, Oil and Gas, Research and Financial Services industries among
others, where support for high bandwidth and high IOPS workloads is
essential, DDN is placing previews of IME technology into leading HPC
facilities around the world and currently has placed test beds in over a
dozen Top100 sites.
-- Planning for exascale, accelerating time to discovery and extracting
results from massive data sets requires organizations to continually
seek faster and more efficient solutions to provision I/O and accelerate
applications.
-- DDN's IME is the world's first, application-aware, non-volatile memory
enabled acceleration engine and buffer cache. IME resides between the
high-performance compute and parallel file system in an HPC environment,
and maximizes compute utilization without crippling the storage
back-end. By virtualizing SSDs across the entire environment into a
single fast tier of storage, users now can take advantage of the
declining price of commodity hardware and deliver near in-memory
performance to accelerate I/O, reduce latency and provide greater
operational and economic efficiency.
-- Providing multiple advantages over any competing technology, IME
delivers scale-out data protection with distributed erasure coding,
seamless integration with both Lustre® and GPFS(TM) environments,
intelligent adaptive data placement, POSIX compatibility and
standards-based HPC application interfaces.
-- IME is designed for HPC users looking to benefit from technology that
delivers orders of magnitude improvements in checkpointing and
I/O-intensive HPC application performance.
-- Heralding a major step forward in DDN's software defined storage
strategy, the new IME technology demonstrates DDN's focus on designing
state-of-the-art HPC and Big Data solutions, which also include WOS®
Object Storage technologies as well as DDN's highly optimized SFA
storage appliances.
Tweet this: DDN changes the game: delivers 1000X I/O acceleration across HPC apps w/@DDN_Limitless Infinite Memory Engine http://bit.ly/1um6KqR
IME Decouples Physical Storage from Compute Resources to Redefine the I/O Provisioning Paradigm, Driving Increased I/O and Application Performance, Flexibility and Lower Total Cost of Storage
-- IME enables organizations to separate the provisioning of peak and
sustained performance requirements with up to 70 percent greater
operational efficiency and cost savings than utilizing exclusively
disk-based parallel file systems.
-- Inserting IME between the compute and parallel file system removes POSIX
semantics that bring cluster performance to its knees due to the
proliferation of small and mal-aligned I/O that can often make up 90
percent of the HPC workload. By shielding parallel file systems from
fragmented I/O in cache, with IME users now can run jobs at or near line
rate with more jobs in parallel resulting in faster time to insight.
-- Unlike simple burst buffer technologies that have been designed for
write-intensive, large file sequential operations such as
checkpoint-restart, IME enables acceleration across a wide array of HPC
applications and workloads with no application modifications required.
-- In addition, IME enables greater flexibility and choice for end users
due to its non-vendor-captive software-based approach. DDN's open, no
vendor lock-in solution provides extreme flexibility in how users can
architect their environments and a wide selection of specialty and
commodity hardware platforms and components.
Supporting Quotes
-- Molly Rector, CMO, EVP Product Management and WW Marketing at DDN
"DDN's IME delivers a wide range of advances that will enable the next generation of high performance computing capabilities. IME is a complete game changer in application acceleration, performance optimization, SSD utilization and high-performance storage. Years of development and investment from some of the greatest minds in high performance computing have delivered IME as a transparent solution to any data-intensive HPC application. Building on DDN's unparalleled leadership in delivering extreme performance, and with more than a dozen active test beds in use today, this announcement delivers once again on DDN's leadership in HPC."
-- Gilles Civario, Senior Software Architect, ICHEC
"DDN's IME can transform the I/O-bound problem back into a compute-bound problem. Using IME, ICHEC is seeing a 3x acceleration of the entire Tullow Oil production application -- not just the I/O portion. Clearly there is great potential for this technology in this and other sectors."
-- Tommy Minyard, Phd, Director of Advanced Computing Systems at TACC
"TACC is very excited to participate with DDN to perform large scale testing of DDN's IME on Stampede, currently one of the world's fastest supercomputers. This type of joint partnership testing enables TACC to prove powerful leading-edge advanced computing technologies for the open science community."
Availability
-- IME is available in limited release today as part of DDN's IME testbed
program.
Supporting Resources
-- Connect with DDN at SC14
-- More on IME
-- Follow DDN via Blog and Twitter
DataDirect Networks
DataDirect Networks (DDN) is a leader in data center infrastructure for Big Data and Cloud Storage applications. Our data storage and processing solutions and professional services enable content-rich and high growth IT environments to achieve the highest levels of systems scalability, efficiency and simplicity. DDN enables enterprises to extract value and deliver results from their information. Our customers include the world's leading online content and social networking providers, high performance cloud and grid computing, life sciences, financial services, media production, and security and intelligence organizations. Deployed in thousands of mission critical environments worldwide, DDN's solutions have been designed, engineered and proven in the world's most scalable data centers to ensure competitive business advantage for today's information powered enterprise. For more information, go to http://www.ddn.com or call +1-800-TERABYTE (837-2298).