Sandia stores petabytes of data with SGI tools
Sandia National Laboratories has installed an SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 solution capable of housing more than 1.8 petabytes (1.8 million gigabytes) of scientific data.
The storage system provides the extreme data throughput required for high-speed, distributed access to data, a feature that is vital to supercomputing environments, SGI said.
Sandia scientists evaluate the safety and operational effectiveness of thousands of nuclear warheads, using computer tools to model the life cycle of a nuclear weapon. Such large-scale simulations let scientists study the life cycle of nuclear stockpiles without performing underground detonations, but those simulations put enormous demands on the storage environment at Sandia, SGI said.
A facility of the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration, Sandia has a storage environment made up of 17 InfiniteStorage 4600 systems, based on the seventh-generation LSI XBB2 architecture. The system is designed to reach a sustained data exchange rate of 72 gigabits/sec, SGI said.
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Trudy Walsh is a senior writer for GCN.