Case Study: National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) achieves accelerated scientific discovery with DataDirect Networks' SFA10K & SFA12K storage

National Center for Supercomputing Applications - Customer Case Study

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois provides campus-wide high-performance computing and data services but faced shrinking mid-range research funding and the complexity of a “condo-style” shared cluster model. Supporting many investor groups with different hardware generations and configuration needs made unified administration, queuing and storage access difficult and slowed project start-up times.

NCSA deployed DDN SFA10K and SFA12K InfiniBand storage appliances to create a single, scalable storage pool with nearly 1PB of capacity, allowing incremental expansion and support for mixed generations of hardware. The solution centralized resources, freed grad students from system administration, shortened project start-up, enabled 22 investor groups to share the platform, and delivered up to ~20% more compute and storage value per investment through economies of scale and optimized performance.

National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA)