SUNNYVALE, Calif., and LONDON, Jan. 9 – Panasas, Inc., the leader in high performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, today announced that the UK's University of Nottingham has upgraded its high performance computing (HPC) center with Panasas ActiveStor 12 storage in a 240 terabyte deployment. The new cluster is used by numerous departments across the university, including computer science, pharmacy and engineering.

"We are delighted that the University of Nottingham chose Panasas to satisfy its HPC storage requirements," said Barbara Murphy , chief marketing officer at Panasas. "ActiveStor gives the university unmatched performance, scalability and reliability without complex and time-consuming system management. We look forward to continuing to work with the university, as well as our many other academic customers in the region."

The University of Nottingham, ranked in the UK's top 10 in the Shanghai Jiao Tong (SJTU) World University Rankings and within the top 100 in the QS World University Rankings, first upgraded to Panasas in 2007 when it purchased an ActiveStor 7 solution to overcome performance problems associated with its previous storage system.

"We saw a big improvement in performance with the acquisition of Panasas ActiveStor," said Chris Booth , senior systems developer. "Also, our previous storage system went down about once a month. ActiveStor has never gone down – ever."

Researchers in the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Department, whose work includes the simulation of proteins to understand diseases and enable the development of drugs to help fight or prevent them, are among the most demanding users of the HPC center. Their simulation of the motion of proteins is a complex task that can involve trillions of time-steps to map each movement of every protein, requiring a high-performance compute cluster and parallel storage.

"Our simulations are computationally challenging, but with the new high performance computer systems and ActiveStor parallel storage we're starting to make some progress," said Professor Jonathan Hirst , head of the Physical and Theoretical Chemistry Department. "Reliability and unflagging storage performance are indispensable for our research."

With limited IT staff, ease-of-use was a primary consideration for the university. "ActiveStor is fantastically easy to configure and manage," said Dr. Booth. "We don't have a dedicated storage administrator, so it's essential that our systems don't take a lot of time and effort to manage."

The University of Nottingham, described by The Sunday Times University Guide 2011 as 'the embodiment of the modern international university', has 40,000 students at award-winning campuses in the United Kingdom, China and Malaysia. It is ranked in the UK's Top 10 and the World's Top 75 universities by the Shanghai Jiao Tong (SJTU) and the QS World University Rankings. It was named 'the world's greenest university' in the UI GreenMetric World University Ranking 2011. More than 90 per cent of research at The University of Nottingham is of international quality, according to the most recent Research Assessment Exercise. The University's vision is to be recognised around the world for its signature contributions, especially in global food security, energy & sustainability, and health. The University won a Queen's Anniversary Prize for Higher and Further Education in 2011, for its research into global food security.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leader in high-performance parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads, enables customers to rapidly solve complex computing problems, speed innovation and accelerate new product introduction. All Panasas storage products leverage the patented PanFS storage operating system to deliver superior performance, data protection, scalability and manageability. Panasas systems are optimized for demanding storage environments in the bioscience, energy, finance, government, manufacturing, and university markets.

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Source: Panasas