Uppsala U's UPPMAX Expands Storage with Panasas Storage Hardware

  • By Dian Schaffhauser
  • 11/02/09

Sweden's Uppsala Multidisciplinary Center for Advanced Computational Science (UPPMAX) at Uppsala University has deployed Panasas ActiveStor storage to increase storage capacity alongside an existing Tivoli Storage Manager system. The 500 TB Panasas solution was installed in two working days this summer by Swedish reseller South Pole.

The Center reported that it expects to add a new high-performance, 2,000-core computer cluster this year and sought a storage setup that could serve many concurrent clients. "We quickly realized that we needed storage with much higher performance. Our traditional NFS servers could not handle the load of our new clusters," said Jukka Komminaho, group leader of system experts. "We required a mix of high-bandwidth access to our clusters and low-latency access to our home directories. Panasas is easily meeting our performance requirements serving applications such as VASP, Gaussian and BLAST as well as our users' home-grown applications."

In addition to providing high-performance for the UPPMAX compute clusters, Panasas storage will be used for the new data being produced by the Center's next-generation sequencing machines--at an estimated rate of a terabyte per day.

"We're standardizing on Panasas storage in our next-generation sequencing archive today, and are planning to double the capacity in early 2010," said Jonas Hagberg, storage expert. "The ease of scalability of our Panasas solution is very important, as is the ability to integrate Panasas seamlessly with Tivoli Storage Manager."

Following installation, the system entered a one-month acceptance period. "We have measured performance and reliability in our general acceptance tests and are very pleased with the results," said Ingela Nystrom, director of UPPMAX.

UPPMAX is one of six centers in the national Swedish National Infrastructure for Computing (SNIC). The UPPMAX service provides high-performance computing resources to many users within Uppsala U as well as other universities in Sweden.

About the Author

Dian Schaffhauser is a former senior contributing editor for 1105 Media's education publications THE Journal, Campus Technology and Spaces4Learning.

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