December 16, 2005
Rice University has selected BlueArc Corporation's Titan Storage System as the campus's central data repository, eliminating the need for more than 50 disparate file servers and easing storage management through consolidation. Titan was selected for the system's high performance and capacity as well as its ability to support the campus's rapidly growing data, while allowing for future expansion.
For Rice, technology resources are a critical element for the university's students, faculty and researchers. Storage demands at Rice have been skyrocketing in recent years as the Internet and the campus network play an increasing role in the academic curriculum -- ranging from e-mail storage and file storage for course work programs and applications, to home directories and digital media archival.
As data demands grew at the university, information was commonly housed in individual silos at departments or schools, eliminating the ability for storage to be managed by central IT -- putting student and faculty's academic research at risk. To offer users the true management and protection through the data's full lifecycle, an enterprise storage system was needed that offered capacity scaling into the hundreds of terabytes if necessary, while sustaining thousands of simultaneous user connections, delivering simplified management, and the ability to migrate data between tiers of storage based on policies or off-site for backup. After an investigation into multiple Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Storage Area Network (SAN) vendors, BlueArc's Titan was selected in an active-active configuration with 92 terabytes of multi-tiered storage, featuring both high performance Fibre Channel drives and high-density Serial ATA disks.
"Titan provides Rice with a network storage platform that will scale in both performance and capacity to meet today's needs and those of the future," said Barry Ribbeck, director of systems architecture and infrastructure for Rice University. "BlueArc has delivered an architecture capable of supporting our growing university community, enabling us to greatly simplify our technology environment by eliminating dozens of servers as well as introducing new features such as Information Lifecycle Management. We are excited to provide our students, faculty and researchers a technology foundation they can rely on to securely store and quickly access their most-important data for years to come."
"BlueArc continues to be impressed by how customers implement solutions to real-world problems, through a new approach to network storage -- both in the enterprise market and in academia, utilizing Titan's unique characteristics to their fullest potential," said Steve Daheb, vice president of marketing and business development for BlueArc. "We are pleased to work with Rice University as a key technology solution partner, enabling the university to consolidate resources and greatly simplify storage management."
Not content to let the Tianhe-2 announcement ride alone, Intel rolled out a series of announcements around its Knights Corner and Xeon Phi products--all of which are aimed at adding some options and variety for a wider base of potential users across the HPC spectrum. Today at the International Supercomputing Conference, the company's Raj....
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The Top 500 list of the world's fastest computers has just been announced. Not surprisingly, since it's been reported on prior to the official announcement, the Chinese Tianhe-2 system tops the list. And that is an understatement. We talk with Jack Dongarra, Horst Simon, Hans Meuer and others from the....
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The advent of low-power mobile processors and cloud delivery models is changing the economics of computing. But just as an economy car is good at different things than a full size truck, an HPC workload still has certain computing demands that neither the fastest smartphone nor the most elastic cloud cluster can fulfill.
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For all the progress we've made in IT over the last 50 years, there's one area of life that has steadfastly eluded the grasp of computers: understanding human language. Now, researchers at the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) are utilizing a Hadoop cluster on its Longhorn supercomputer to move the state of the art of language processing a little bit further.
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Titan, the Cray XK7 at the Oak Ridge National Lab that debuted last fall as the fastest supercomputer in the world with 17.59 petaflops of sustained computing power, will rely on its previous LINPACK test for the upcoming edition of the Top 500 list.
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At 31 petaflops of sustained LINPACK capacity, the new Chinese Tianhe-2 supercomputer will be the fastest supercomputer in the world when this month's Top 500 list comes out, as we reported previously in HPCwire.
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HPC system makers are lining up to announce compatibility with the new fourth generation Intel Core processor, codenamed "Haswell." The new Iris GPUs based on the Haswell architecture are giving Intel new credibility in the graphics processing department.
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Join our webinar to learn how IT managers can migrate to a more resilient, flexible and scalable solution that grows with the data center. Mellanox VMS is future-proof, efficient and brings significant CAPEX and OPEX savings. The VMS is available today.