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Accelerate: Academic, Scientific and Industrial Research DDN Storage Empowers Pawsey Supercomputing Center to Speed Scientific Discoveries that Reveal the Secrets of the Universe
Technology Category
- Application Infrastructure & Middleware - Data Exchange & Integration
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) - Cloud Storage Services
Applicable Industries
- Aerospace
- Education
Applicable Functions
- Business Operation
- Product Research & Development
Use Cases
- Edge Computing & Edge Intelligence
- Predictive Maintenance
- Real-Time Location System (RTLS)
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Data Science Services
The Challenge
The Pawsey Supercomputing Center in Perth, Western Australia, is one of the most powerful facilities in the Southern Hemisphere. It supports scientific breakthroughs in radio astronomy, energy resources, and engineering. At any given point, more than a thousand scientists rely on Pawsey’s state-of-the-art facilities to conduct data-intensive research, complex simulations, and advanced visualizations. The Center also plays a pivotal role in the trailblazing Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, which focuses on building a next-generation radio telescope that will be more sensitive and powerful than today’s most advanced telescopes to survey the universe with incredible depth and speed. The SKA project will generate massive amounts of data from thousands of connected antennae, giving astronomers unprecedented insights into the formation of the universe. To support this ground-breaking research, Pawsey must provide scientists around the world with easy access to high-end computing platforms and resilient, scalable storage.
About The Customer
The Pawsey Supercomputing Center in Perth, Western Australia, is one of two tier 1 high-performance computing (HPC) centers in Australia and one of the most powerful facilities in the Southern Hemisphere. Pawsey supports scientific breakthroughs in radio astronomy, energy resources, and engineering. At any given point, more than a thousand scientists rely on Pawsey’s state-of-the-art facilities to conduct data-intensive research, complex simulations, and advanced visualizations. The Center also plays a pivotal role in the trailblazing Square Kilometer Array (SKA) project, which focuses on building a next-generation radio telescope that will be more sensitive and powerful than today’s most advanced telescopes to survey the universe with incredible depth and speed. According to Neil Stringfellow, executive director of the Pawsey Supercomputing Center, the SKA project will generate massive amounts of data from thousands of connected antennae, giving astronomers unprecedented insights into the formation of the universe.
The Solution
The Pawsey Supercomputing Center sought reliable high-performance, high-density disk infrastructure that would provide the flexibility to scale storage both out and up as needed. The ability to plug seamlessly into other existing tape and cloud storage as well as back-end systems was important, as was the ability to address the Center’s diverse research requirements. After weighing all its selection criteria, Pawsey deployed two DDN GS12K storage appliances with 5 PBs of storage capacity, supporting an array of game-changing scientific discoveries, including the Desert Fireball Network (DFN) project. One of the first projects to take advantage of the new DDN storage, DFN uses cameras to track fireballs as they shoot across the Australian desert night sky, aiding in the discovery and retrieval of newly fallen meteorites. After ingestion, this network of images then resides on the DDN GS12Ks. Researchers work with metadata to triangulate events that facilitate rapid meteorite recovery.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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