Panasas helps drive academic research initiatives

Author: Isha Jain

Panasas has announced that a number of leading academic research institutions are using storage solutions from the Panasas’ ActiveStor portfolio to support their modern high-performance computing (HPC) environments.

Along with many university research institutions, the Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI), the UC San Diego Centre for Microbiome Innovation (CMI), and LES MINES ParisTech, have trusted it to deliver the necessary data storage and management capabilities to support the HPC and AI workloads fuelling their research advancement.

Modern HPC environments fast tracking academic research

According to Hyperion Research, total HPC spending in 2022 reached $37bn and is projected to exceed $52bn in 2026. A key growth driver is that an increasing number of organisations and countries see the value of innovation and investing in R&D to advance society, grow revenues, reduce costs and remain competitive.

High-performance data storage is the lifeblood of an academic research infrastructure. These research institutions cannot afford lost data, as it could set back the research program by months or even years. As these organisations simultaneously run and analyse data sets across multiple HPC and AI/ML applications with varied IO patterns and file sizes, they require an always-on storage solution that can manage the capacity of these bandwidth-intensive and mixed workloads while scaling to support growth.

The Panasas’ ActiveStor portfolio of modern HPC storage solutions provides the reliability research teams need to keep their projects on track while eliminating the management burdens associated with roll-your-own and open-source storage systems. Its solutions currently power innovative research in agriculture, astrophysics, bioinformatics, climate research, computational chemistry, genome analysis, geophysics, high energy physics, machine learning, materials science, molecular biology and more.

Here are a few examples of how Panasas is helping advance research within some of the most prestigious academic institutions across the globe:

• The Minnesota Supercomputing Institute (MSI) has relied on its storage for many years to support its growing HPC and AI research initiatives. Recently adding 10PB of additional storage, the institute leverages the company’s ActiveStor Ultra appliances running the Panasas PanFS parallel file system for a single-tier architecture that enables it to easily manage the unique set of mixed workloads that multiple research groups carry out every day.
• The UC San Diego Centre for Microbiome Innovation (CMI) has used it to build the data foundation it needed for continued research excellence, including the power to expedite data exploration and discovery with better control, usability and optimal uptime.
• The TU Freiberg is utilising Panasas as its parallel scratch file system.
• Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) team consolidated its storage onto Panasas ActiveStor and gained the scalability, performance and manageability that its workflows demanded, freeing up researchers’ time to spend time working on the data rather than managing and moving it. Today, a single IT manager spends half their time supporting 1,500 nodes.

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