Case Study: Poland's National Centre for Nuclear Research achieves faster, reliable HPC 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 a 1,000+ person Swierk Computing Centre, needed fast, highly available storage to support HPC workloads and more than 1 PB of unstructured data. Legacy Lustre storage was fast but unreliable, forcing researchers to choose slower HP storage for reliability or risk losing weeks of compute time when failures occurred.

NCBJ migrated users’ home directories to a two-node NetApp FAS6280 cluster running clustered Data ONTAP with NetApp Flash Cache (with help from NetApp Global Services and partner Koma Nord) over NFS. The unified platform eliminated planned and unplanned downtime, enabled 24/7 processing, delivered required throughput in a 40% smaller footprint, used Snapshot/SnapRestore for protection, and avoided roughly US$10,000 per downtime incident—streamlining workflows and accelerating research.

Poland's National Centre for Nuclear Research

Adam Padee

Head of Computational Infrastructure