ACCELERATE: NATIONAL LABORATORIES North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) Accelerates Scientific Breakthroughs with Peta-Scale Computing and DataDirect Networks High-Performance Storage
Customer Company Size
Large Corporate
Region
- Europe
Country
- Germany
Product
- Cray® XC30
- DDN® SFA®12K-40
- Lustre®
- DDN’s GRIDScaler®
- IBM® GPFS
Tech Stack
- High-Performance Computing
- Distributed Computing
- Data Storage
- Parallel File Systems
- Big Data Analytics
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Productivity Improvements
- Innovation Output
- Cost Savings
Technology Category
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Computing
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Education
- Life Sciences
Applicable Functions
- Discrete Manufacturing
- Product Research & Development
- Quality Assurance
Use Cases
- Predictive Maintenance
- Process Control & Optimization
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
- System Integration
About The Customer
The North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) is a collaboration of scientists across seven North-German states, providing state-of-the-art storage and compute resources to accelerate scientific breakthroughs in various fields. Established in 2001, the alliance currently supports scientists and researchers from Berlin, Brandenburg, Bremen, Hamburg, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Niedersachsen and Schleswig-Holstein. The scientists, many of whom come from North German universities and other scientific institutions, have combined resources and funding from their respective states and the German federal government to create a powerful, distributed supercomputer system. The system is operated by a team of experts at Zuse Institute Berlin (ZIB) and at the High Performance Computing Center at Leibniz University in Hannover (RRZN).
The Challenge
The North German Supercomputing Alliance (HLRN) provides scientists across seven North-German states with state-of-the-art storage and compute resources to accelerate scientific breakthroughs in the fields of physics, chemistry, fluid dynamics, engineering and the environment. The scientists, many of whom come from North German universities and other scientific institutions, have combined resources and funding from their respective states and the German federal government to create a powerful, distributed supercomputer system. HLRN’s ability to drive advanced scientific research requires the highest levels of compute power as well as high-bandwidth storage capacity. Given the wide range of data-intensive applications supported by the institute, HLRN sought a Big Data solution that could deliver a significant increase in storage capacity while scaling bandwidth and performance as needed. HLRN also needed to ensure that data could be accessed easily from different geographic locations.
The Solution
HLRN sought an ideal balance between compute power and storage capacity, along with matching bandwidth to facilitate fast and reliable access to all data on disk in a distributed fashion. So, the team included a benchmark to measure I/O performance of compute and storage resources, like bandwidth and metered data performance. In measuring the results of the I/O performance, the team determined that high-performance storage from DataDirect Networks (DDN), in partnership with Cray Inc., would provide the optimal foundation for the alliance’s peta-scale supercomputer environment. HLRN teamed with Cray and DDN to design and deploy a distributed supercomputing system based on Cray XC30 and DDN’s SFA12K-40 with Lustre and DDN’s GRIDScaler file system appliance with IBM General Parallel File System (GPFS) for their “Work” file system that handles computationally intensive workloads. Additionally, HLRN took advantage of its DDN system to support a GPFS for “home” storage, where scientists can store their programs and most important data.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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