National Computational Infrastructure beefs up storage capacity

NCI now has storage capacity of 44 petabytes

The National Computational Infrastructure (NCI) has selected flash storage to boost its capacity from 33 petabytes to 44.

This will enable NCI to deliver high speed, low latency access for 3000 Australian researchers, industry and government clients.

“As a provider of high performance computing and data services we manage large amounts of customer data," said NCI director Professor Lindsay Botten.

“As a result of constant growth in data holdings and scientific research projects that generate and analyse petabytes of new data in very short time frames, we needed to design a pod-based storage architecture that can scale seamlessly in pre-determined blocks of capacity.”

NCI implemented NetApp’s FAS, E-series and EF all-flash storage integrated solution with VMware and OpenStack.

The implementation was necessary as the NCI is building global parallel file systems for holding the National Environmental Research Data Collection (NERDC). The collection will include national datasets ranging from deep space research to the Earth’s core.

This collection will be accessible from NCI’s supercomputer Raijin and the NCI cloud at a speed of 100 Gps.

By bringing the important datasets together within the data and computational environment of NCI, researchers will be able to find and use the data in ways that wouldn’t otherwise be possible, said Botten.

Based in Canberra, the NCI is Australia’s national research computing facility. Its partners include the Australian National University, CSIRO, RMIT, Deakin University, Intersect and the Bureau of Meteorology (BoM).

BoM is collaborating with NCI to test and refine its next-generation weather forecasting models to provide better prediction power.

Follow Hamish Barwick on Twitter: @HamishBarwick

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Tags storagenetappNational Computational Infrastructure (NCI)

More about Australian National UniversityBureau of MeteorologyCSIRODeakin UniversityFASNetAppRMIT

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