NEC's High Performance Computing Group (HPCE) is being helped by Promise Technology's RAID systems to supplement its parallel file system, LXFS. Initial installations have already been deployed in universities, a science centre and an automotive R&D department.
'Promise RAID systems are the perfect supplement to NEC's parallel file system concept LXFS for HPC,' said Dr Andreas Findling, senior product line manager, NEC Deutschland. 'Data centre demands for higher computing power, networking bandwidth and support for virtualisation applications are driving system requirements for improved host bus interface and RAID performance.'
The NEC LXFS/Promise solution is already deployed at a leading French science centre; the first PetaByte capacity project being fully completed. This solution is a RAID 5 configuration with SAS cascading of VTrak E-Class systems – the features of which made this such a compelling and intriguing project implementation for the centre.
The joint solution has also been deployed at several major German universities gaining them the same functionalities as found within the other installations. The universities have already reaped the benefits of this joint solution deployment including the flexibility to respond to customer needs, increased ease-of-expansion, the performance benefits of the speed of the SAS interfaces, as well as reduced TCO (total cost of ownership).
A major European automotive customer deploys hundreds of compute nodes based on AMD and Intel quad-core processors connected into an InfiniBand fabric.
