Case Study: École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) achieves major I/O performance gains in brain tissue simulation with DataDirect Networks' IME

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) - Customer Case Study

The Blue Brain Project at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) is an international effort to digitally reconstruct and simulate the brain. Its interdisciplinary team of about 100 researchers runs complex simulation workflows and many different tools, which produce diverse access patterns that made I/O a major bottleneck—particularly around caching and overlapping I/O operations.

To address this, BBP deployed DDN’s IME Flash‑Native Data Cache alongside Lustre to optimize data access. The IME resolved the caching and overlap issues, alleviating the I/O bottleneck and enabling smoother, more efficient brain tissue simulations for the project’s research workflows.

École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

Judit Planas

Postdoctoral Researcher