Case Study: National Centre for Nuclear Research accelerates HPC and eliminates downtime with NetApp clustered Data ONTAP

Poland's National Centre for Nuclear Research Accelerates HPC with NetApp Clustered Data ONTAP

Poland’s National Centre for Nuclear Research (NCBJ), the country’s largest nuclear research institute operating the MARIA reactor and supporting international projects like CERN, faced an urgent HPC storage challenge: more than 1 PB of unstructured scientific data required fast, highly available storage for simulation and sensor-analysis workloads. A legacy Lustre array was fast but unreliable, forcing researchers to trade performance for reliability (running jobs on slow HP storage or laptops) and risking costly downtime and lost weeks of compute time.

NCBJ migrated to a two‑node NetApp FAS6280 cluster running clustered Data ONTAP with Flash Cache, using NetApp Global Services and partner Koma Nord for a nondisruptive migration over NFS. The unified solution eliminated planned/unplanned downtime, enabled 24/7 processing from researchers’ home directories, improved throughput while reducing footprint by ~40%, added Snapshot/SnapRestore protection, and avoided roughly US $10,000 in losses per incident—streamlining workflows and accelerating research.

National Centre for Nuclear Research

Adam Padee

Head of computational infrastructure