Case Study: NCSA/University of Illinois achieves sustained petascale I/O performance and high availability for Blue Waters with Extreme Networks BlackDiamond X8

NCSA - Customer Case Study

NCSA (University of Illinois) operates Blue Waters, a petascale supercomputer delivering sustained 1 petaflops performance and supporting 25 PB of usable storage with 1.2 TB/s aggregate bandwidth. To move up to 100 GB/s to/from storage and across the WAN while supporting massive, line‑rate transfers, NCSA required a high‑performance, low‑latency, highly available, single‑chassis, non‑blocking core switch with 40GbE support and very high port density — a challenge met by Extreme Networks with its BlackDiamond X8.

Extreme Networks deployed the BlackDiamond X8 as Blue Waters' core switch, providing the needed port density and line‑rate performance (up to 192×40GbE or 768×10GbE in one chassis and >20 Tbps switching capacity). The X8 passed NCSA’s validation (24 servers pushed 382 Gbps bi‑directionally), is using ~90% of its ports in production, and delivered reliable, low‑latency transfers for multiple petabytes of traffic and sustained high‑speed I/O while adding redundancy and simplifying management.

NCSA

Michelle Butler

Senior Technical Program Manager