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Stanford U

The Institute for Computational and Mathematical Engineering (ICME) at Stanford University claims it's found high-performance storage muscle without a SAN, thanks to a cluster-friendly, network-attached system from Panasas Inc.

For the last six months, ICME has used that vendor's ActiveStorage system to power high-performance computing (HPC) clusters based on Rocks open-source code.

"We needed a solution that was easily integratable into our Rocks cluster," says Steve Jones, technology operations manager at ICME.
Rocks is an open-source software suite that generates a common database and management system for Linux clusters. It was developed in part by the
San Diego Supercomputer Center and is
available online.

Early this year, things had hit the wall for the ICME cluster, which includes 164 processors running on 82 computers on campus. The cluster is used to conduct sponsored research for a range of government agencies, including the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).

Panasas came into the picture when ICME wanted a cluster-oriented storage system that wouldn't involve a SAN.

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