Case Study: Pawsey Supercomputing Center achieves faster scientific discoveries with DataDirect Networks

DDN Storage Empowers Pawsey Supercomputing Center to Speed Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Secrets of the Universe

The Pawsey Supercomputing Center in Perth, a Tier 1 HPC facility supporting radio astronomy (including the SKA pathfinders), energy and geoscience research, struggled with rapidly growing data rates, mixed I/O workloads and the need to manage roughly 50 large data collections and 150 concurrent projects. Researchers required resilient, secure and easily accessible storage that could scale non‑disruptively and support both large parallel jobs and many smaller, metadata‑heavy tasks.

Pawsey deployed DDN’s GRIDScaler with IBM Spectrum Scale—two GS12K appliances providing 5 PB of scalable storage plus an additional 2 PB of scratch—offering high performance, stability, automatic tiering, replication and seamless integration with tape and cloud. The result was a reliable, scalable storage platform that accelerated projects like the Desert Fireball Network and GLEAM, improved data protection and researcher access, and positioned Pawsey to handle future SKA data growth.

Pawsey Supercomputing Center

Neil Stringfellow

Executive Director