SGI Provides Massive Storage for Australian Supercomputer

SGI announced that iVEC and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) have selected SGI to provide the massive data management infrastructure at the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. The centre is part of the Australian Government Super Science Initiative to support the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and the Murchison Widefield Array (MWA) radio astronomy facility.

The ASKAP and MWA projects are expected to generate eight petabytes of data each year, all of which will be stored at the Pawsey center. When data is added from other research areas, the storage estimates are raised to ten petabytes annually. To manage this massive amount of data CSIRO selected an SGI InfiniteStorage and SGI UV 2000 based solution to address the scale and cost-efficiency requirements for a project of this magnitude. The solution comprises disk storage systems and licences to support up to 100 petabytes of online storage that is virtualized across multiple performance tiers by SGI DMF software, with data ingest and workflow managed by SGI LiveArc. The primary six petabytes of storage is integrated with 40 petabytes of data tape libraries and provides expansion capabilities to support a seamless 100-petabyte hierarchical storage management (HSM) online environment.

"iVEC is committed to ensuring Australia maintains its place as a world leader in research and scientific computing, and the Pawsey Centre is a critical pillar in this strategy," says Neil Stringfellow, iVEC's executive director. "SGI's storage and data analysis infrastructure is a vital component of the Pawsey infrastructure. In particular the SGI UV 2000 visualisation system with its very large shared memory capability will enable our researchers to manipulate their data in a completely new way, leading to the potential for new insight and ambitious analysis."

The SGI UV 2000 based data-analysis engines and visualisation systems are expected to come online shortly after the Pawsey Centre is in production later this fall.

"For decades, SGI has been solving Big Data challenges for researchers across science and industry in an effort to find answers to the world's toughest challenges," said Jorge Titinger, president and CEO, SGI. "We are very pleased to support the data management needs of the Pawsey Supercomputing Centre. They are conducting impressive research, and with our InfiniteStorage and UV 2000 technology, will be able to reach results and interactions more quickly. We look forward to continuing this partnership and seeing the Pawsey Centre's revolutionary solutions to challenges in science."