BYU Expands With BlueArc

SAN JOSE, Calif. -- BlueArc Corporation, a leader in scalable, high-performance unified network storage, today announced that Brigham Young University's Fulton Supercomputing Lab has implemented a pair of BlueArc Titan storage systems to address their increasing demand for fast, reliable access to terabytes of data for diverse university research projects. These project demands range from modeling aspects of the influenza A virus to simulating the radiation from neutron star collisions, modeling languages and simulating particle physics. In addition to world-record performance, BlueArc's Titan storage system offers BYU's supercomputing facility high reliability for the system's massive workload of simultaneous file- and data-intensive processing tasks.

BYU's Ira and Mary Lou Fulton Supercomputing Laboratory is among the 150 largest such facilities in the world. At the heart of the lab is marylou4, a Linux cluster comprising 630 nodes and 2,500 processor cores available for faculty and students who need more compute power than their desktops can provide. The supercomputing facility presently supports more than 200 researchers as well as users in the university's award-winning animation department. Operations Director Tom Raisor chose the BlueArc solution after canvassing other university supercomputing lab directors, evaluating a wide variety of network storage vendors and consulting with services provider VarData, a BlueArc value-added reseller.

"BYU offers computing capacity to all students and faculty who need it, and BlueArc Titan technology met our primary criteria of speed and reliability for tasks using massive files as well as the more difficult challenge of handling millions of tiny files," said Raisor. "VarData recognized that BlueArc was a good fit for our needs and went the extra mile to ensure that none of our questions or concerns went unanswered. The product we received was the product we expected. Just as important, the ringing endorsement for BlueArc from other supercomputing facility managers validated our decision."

BlueArc Corp.