Panasas Storage Solution Drives Dramatic Performance Improvement to Accelerate Core Research

Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world’s most performance-intensive applications, today announced that the Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems (CU-CCMS) has chosen the Panasas ActiveStor(TM) parallel storage system to help accelerate its research and innovation. CU-CCMS is a comprehensive computational engineering center dedicated to solving the most complex problems for the automotive, aviation, and energy industries. CU-CCMS uses massive-scale engineering simulation to help industry sponsors reduce development time, improve product quality and cost, and achieve success in the global marketplace. The center operates one of the top 10 most powerful university supercomputers in the United States, according to the November 2008 list of top 500 supercomputer sites (www.top500.org).

“After an exhaustive search for a fully integrated hardware-software solution to take care of our parallel I/O storage need, we chose Panasas,” said Dr. James Leylek, executive director of CU-CCMS. “The fact that some of our key clients provided powerful, positive and convincing testimonials made it relatively easy for us to decide on the Panasas system. We’re solving the industry’s toughest engineering challenges, and we needed dramatic simulation time improvements. We’re confident that with Panasas, our customers’ most mission critical computer-aided engineering computations will scale to their full potential.”

The CU-CCMS system consists of 430 Sun blade servers, with a total of 3,440 Intel Xeon processing cores and 14 terabytes (TB) of memory. The system completed the LINPACK benchmark at 27.3 TFLOPS, or 27.3 trillion mathematical computations per second, which ranks it among the world’s most powerful computer systems. The addition of Panasas technology resulted in substantially higher levels of overall throughput due to the benefits of a parallel file system and storage architecture that enables accelerated input and output of simulation data.

“Our parallel storage is optimized to respond broadly to high performance demands and in particular to large-scale application environments,” said Randy Strahan, CEO, Panasas. “Working with CU-CCMS provides an extraordinary opportunity to enable world class research engineers to test the outer boundaries of performance and help drive innovation in the transportation and energy industries.”

About Clemson University and CU-CCMS

Clemson University is a nationally ranked science and technology-oriented public research university known for its emphasis on collaboration, focus, and a culture that encourages faculty and students to embrace bold ideas. Its teaching, research and outreach are driving economic development and improving quality of life in South Carolina and beyond. Clemson is a high-energy, student-centered community dedicated to intellectual leadership, innovation, service, and a determination to excel. For more information, visit www.clemson.edu/research.

The Clemson University Computational Center for Mobility Systems
(CU-CCMS) is a comprehensive computational engineering center dedicated to solving problems for the automotive, aviation and energy industries. Located at Clemson University’s International Center for Automotive Research (CU-ICAR), it provides unique and validated methods that yield physically realistic results for a diverse array of disciplines. Powered by a massive, dedicated high performance computing (HPC) system, CU-CCMS supplies cost-effective solutions while efficiently converting ideas into products that will compete in the global marketplace. For more information, visit www.clemson.edu/cu-ccms.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leading provider of high-performance storage for the world’s most performance-intensive applications, helps commercial, government and academic organizations accelerate their time to results, leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people’s lives. Panasas’ high-performance storage systems enable customers to maximize the benefits of compute clusters by eliminating the storage bottleneck created with legacy network storage technologies. Panasas ActiveStor Parallel Storage Clusters, in conjunction with the ActiveScale(R) operating environment and
PanFS(TM) parallel file system, offer the most comprehensive portfolio of storage solutions for high performance computing (HPC) environments. Panasas is headquartered in Fremont, California. For more information, please visit www.panasas.com.