ACCELERATE: NATIONAL LABORATORIES DDN and SGI Deliver Advanced Image Acquisition, Storage, Retrieval, and Processing Enabling Real-Time Intelligence on the Battlefi eld in the Naval Research Laboratory’s Large Data Joint Capabilities Technology Demonstration
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- DDN® storage architecture
- SGI’s scalable shared memory systems
Tech Stack
- Infiniband technology
- WAN encryption and replication technology
- Parallel file system
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Digital Expertise
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Hybrid Cloud
Applicable Industries
- National Security & Defense
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Logistics & Transportation
Use Cases
- Track & Trace of Assets
- Vehicle Telematics
- Autonomous Robots
Services
- System Integration
- Hardware Design & Engineering Services
About The Customer
The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) is the corporate research laboratory for the United States Navy and the United States Marine Corps. It conducts a wide range of basic scientific research, applied research, technological development and prototyping. A few of the laboratory's current specialties include plasma physics, space physics, materials science, and tactical electronic warfare. NRL is one of the first US Government scientific R&D laboratories, having opened in 1923 at the instigation of Thomas Edison, and is currently under the Office of Naval Research. NRL's research expenditures are approximately $1.1 billion per year.
The Challenge
The military has been using satellite, manned airborne, and Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) photography to gain insight into the battlefield. However, the challenge lies in obtaining rapid access to the information being collected, sharing it among analysts, planners, and decision makers, and using it to provide a decisive advantage. As sensors increase in numbers and analysis is performed in multiple spectrums, the amount of data being generated has grown tremendously, requiring new technologies to retrieve, store, move, and make sense of it. The Large Data Joint Capability Technology Demonstration (Large Data JCTD) project at NRL is designed to meet this challenge. The project requires handling massively large data files and total data sets. Even in trials, the data would reach nearly a Petabyte per site and require ingest and output rates exceeding 3GB/s. As data is acquired, it may need to be automatically replicated between each Large Data JCTD site. At the data rates required by the project, this presented challenges in both WAN transport and encryption technologies.
The Solution
The storage challenge of Large Data JCTD was met by DDN. The company’s storage systems were purpose built for speed and scalability and have been deployed in the world’s leading supercomputing sites, where bandwidth and massive data storage are the norm. DDN supplied high-performance storage system appliances to each Large Data JCTD site, managing disk arrays that are scalable to nearly a Petabyte each in a dense footprint using only two data center racks. The DDN high-performance storage system solution is unique because it can handle the rapid data ingest rates of today’s sensors, while scaling to allow for future growth in bandwidth and capacity as sensors improve. SGI provided Large Data JCTD with an array of Infiniband-connected SGI shared memory systems as well as its CXFS high performance clustered file system. The SGI compute nodes provide all image processing, data management, and automated indexing functions. Infiniband provides a single wire solution for the computing, storage, and communications networks. DataDirect Networks and SGI worked together to integrate their respective systems with WAN encryption and replication technology supplied by additional vendors.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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