SANTA CLARA, Calif., June 19, 2018 — Quobyte Inc., a leading developer of modern storage system software, announced today that the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council’s (STFC) Scientific Computing Department has selected its Data Center File System to manage the JASMIN Phase 4 super-data-cluster with an initial managed capacity of 42PB (petabytes). Thousands of users worldwide find, manipulate and analyze data held on JASMIN, which processes an average of 1-3PB of data every day, and is expected to expand to 300PB by 2022.

JASMIN, which is funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the UK Space Agency (UKSA) and delivered by STFC, provides the UK and European climate and earth-system science communities with a globally unique data intensive analysis and computational e-infrastructure. JASMIN enables scientists to bring their processing to the data because many datasets, particularly model data which can range up to a petabyte, are too big to be easily shipped around or downloaded to their own computers for analysis. The JASMIN facility is a “super-data-cluster” which delivers an e-infrastructure for data analysis. The e-infrastructure provides compute processing and scale-out storage linked together by a high bandwidth network in a unique supercomputing topology that provides short-term project storage, batch computing, hosted and cloud computing services to the European academic and scientific research community, reducing the time it takes to test new ideas and get results; from months or weeks to days or hours.

Quobyte’s Data Center File System gives the JASMIN data facility the ability to unify their file, block, and object storage datasets in a centralized environment consisting of 11,500 cores on 600 nodes. In addition to having S3 connectivity, the Quobyte system also afforded the JASMIN administrators the ability to scale their storage capacity (currently at 42PB) and performance linearly with complete hardware independence while providing ease-of-management with very little staff due to the software’s ability to self-monitor, maintain, and heal. The software’s dashboard allows an administrator to easily monitor thousands of physical machines in real-time, easily identifying load or tracking down issues.

“We’re very pleased that our Data Center File System has been chosen by STFC to manage the JASMIN Phase 4 e-infrastructure upgrade,” said Felix Hupfeld, Quobyte Co-Founder and CTO. “The need to develop ever larger complex models and simulations and to manipulate ever larger sets of data brings in its wake demands for access to HPC and collaboration amongst individual groups on a global scale. Our file system solution provides the necessary foundation for JASMIN to enable STFC to provide an upgraded data science service and on-demand cloud computing capacity and flexibility to its 1,700 registered users, supporting over 160 science projects currently.”

About STFC

The Science and Technology Facilities Council is keeping the UK at the forefront of international science and expertise in materials science, space and ground-based astronomy technologies, laser science and microelectronics, tackling some of the most significant challenges facing society such as meeting our future energy needs, monitoring and understanding climate change, and global security. The Council has a broad science portfolio and works with the academic and industrial communities to share its wafer-scale manufacturing, particle and nuclear physics, alternative energy production, radio communications and radar. STFC operates or hosts world-class experimental facilities in the UK: in addition to hosting JASMIN for the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC), it hosts the ISIS pulsed neutron source, the Central Laser Facility, and LOFAR, and is also the majority shareholder in Diamond Light Source Ltd.

STFC enables UK researchers to access leading international science facilities by funding membership of international bodies including the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN), the Institut Laue Langevin (ILL), the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility (ESRF) and the European Southern Observatory (ESO). STFC is part of UK Research and Innovation in the UK under the direction of the Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy (BEIS). http://www.stfc.ac.uk/

STFC Scientific Computing Department (SCD)

SCD provides services and infrastructure for STFC. We work across a number of large facilities at both the STFC Daresbury Laboratory in Cheshire and the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, which hosts JASMIN. We also have close links with other computing centres around the UK, including the Hartree Centre at Daresbury. SCD manages high performance computing facilities, services and infrastructure, supporting some of UK’s most advanced scientific facilities. Our staff, which is made up of approximately 160 computing experts, offer services and products that help the scientific community to make vital discoveries and deliver progress. The STFC Scientific Computing Department and STFC RAL Space’s Centre for Environmental Data Analysis (CEDA), jointly manage JASMIN.

About Quobyte

Building on a decade of research and experience with the open-source distributed file system XtreemFS and from working on Google’s infrastructure, Quobyte delivers on the promise of software defined storage for the world’s most demanding application environments including High Performance Computing (HPC), Media & Entertainment (M&E), Life Sciences, Financial Services, and Electronic Design Automation (EDA). Quobyte uniquely leverages hyperscaler parallel distributed file system technologies to unify file, block, and object storage. This allows customers to easily replace storage silos with a single, scalable storage system — significantly saving manpower, money, and time spent on storage management. Quobyte allows companies to scale storage capacity and performance linearly on commodity hardware while eliminating the need to expand administrative staff through the software’s ability to self-monitor, self-maintain, and self-heal. Please visit www.quobyte.com for more information.

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Source: Quobyte Inc.