HPCnow! helps the ALBA synchrotron improve data storage performance with Excelero’s NVMesh

Author: Carly Weller

Excelero, a disruptor in software-defined block storage for AI/ML/deep learning and GPU computing, said that its partner HPCnow!, a provider of advanced supercomputing and high performance computing (HPC) services for scientific and research organisations, is helping major life science researchers around the world to accelerate research on COVID-19 and other diseases through more efficient data storage with Excelero’s NVMesh software.

HPCnow! has performed a pilot at ALBA, a synchrotron light facility near Barcelona, to demonstrate how existing storage technologies can effectively deploy elastic NVMe based data storage to support the acquisition and processing of the massive volumes of scientific data generated by its high performance beamlines, which use soft and hard X-rays’ intense light source beams to help to characterise materials, their properties and behaviour. The pilot report will be published in a market consultation of the CELLS in 2020. Over 2,000 researchers in biosciences, condensed matter (magnetic and electronic properties, nanoscience) and materials science obtain unique information from ALBA’s beamlines each year. With a new initiative to support small to medium enterprises performing COVID-19 research, in addition its many other scientific data processing and analysis workloads, ALBA’s IT Systems department needs an efficient scale-out storage to enable timely analysis and conclusions.

Excelero’s NVMesh is software-defined distributed block storage that delivers Elastic NVMe for high performance computing workloads as well as AI/ML/deep learning, data warehouses and containers. Customers benefit from the performance of local flash with the convenience of centralised storage while avoiding proprietary hardware lock-in and reducing the overall storage TCO. Its low-latency, high throughput distributed block storage makes it fast and easy to scale up storage capacity as datasets grow – ensuring HPC applications don’t become bottlenecked, and providing the agility, elasticity, price/performance and ROI that are often hard to achieve at scale.

“Top research institutions need far more throughput than traditional storage systems can provide to power data-intensive microscopy and other research, and we’ve been tremendously impressed with the high IOPS and low latency that Excelero delivers with its NVMesh software,” says David Tur, CEO at HPCnow!, who directed the ALBA proof of concept project. “We are already in the early stages of exploring several large-scale deployments where scale-out storage such as Excelero’s NVMesh can help researchers achieve their goals faster and at lower cost.”