Panasas, Inc. unveiled that the University of Cambridge's High Performance Computing Service (HPCS) is experiencing a significant reduction in the time it takes to complete jobs, as well as increased system uptime. The HPCS provides all departments across the University of Cambridge with centralized, high-performance computing research services. The University maintains a commitment to complement its scientific and engineering expertise with a computing service that meets the demands of twenty-first century simulation and analysis challenges.

    They attribute this boost in performance and productivity to deployment of a Panasas parallel storage system which will allow researchers to complete their projects in less time and will contribute to Cambridge University's sustained world leadership position as a pre-eminent research and educational institution. Cambridge has deployed the Panasas ActiveStore AS5000 solution with the PanFS parallel file system.

    "It is critical that our centralized service provides the ideal platform for software applications with different compute, memory and storage requirements," stated Dr. Paul Calleja, University of Cambridge director of HPC. "The Panasas PanFS parallel file system significantly boosts the performance of applications that take advantage of parallel I/O. Each node on our cluster runs the Panasas DirectFlow client software and has a physical data path to the storage giving us the flexibility to employ parallel I/O across all nodes for single jobs or many individual jobs performing I/O simultaneously. Our users are enjoying an increased job throughput following the deployment of the Panasas solution."

    The HPCS provides a platform for diverse software applications from multiple computing domains including bioinformatics, computational fluid dynamics and computational physics & mathematics. Success of the service is measured tightly in terms of system utilization and job throughput. Panasas ActiveStor Storage Clusters meet the demands of a massively parallel data movement by offering scalable performance and capacity via an object-based approach to Storage. For environments that integrate batch and interactive applications the ActiveStor 5000 series provides capabilities in a unified storage solution eliminating the need for multiple storage systems.

    Where batch processing is the driving consideration the ActiveStor 3000 series delivers unsurpassed capacity bandwidth and throughput enabling jobs to be processed as quickly as possible. The flexibility and capability of the Panasas Parallel Storage Cluster is significantly extended with the introduction of ActiveStor 5000. Key extensions to the core ActiveScale operating environment enable a unified pool of storage that can accommodate the needs of both Linux clusters and technical workstations integrating batch and interactive workflow applications in a unified High Performance Computing (HPC) storage solution.

    Dr. Calleja went on saying: "The reliability of the Panasas solution benefits users with increased uptime, and its manageability has allowed us to reduce our administrative overhead.” The Panasas solution has allowed the HPCS to fulfill its requirements for both performance and data availability with a single solution by providing a highly reliable platform with increased capacity for home directories as well as superior application performance with parallel I/O.