NASA Deploys SGI

DALLAS -- In the quest to design the next generation of spacecraft, NASA researchers produce mountains of scientific and engineering data. The same goes for climate change studies, aeronautics analysis, and research into the earth's atmosphere.

To manage, store and retrieve these vast quantities of information, NASA is deploying a data management solution from SGI (NASDAQ:SGIC). Currently being implemented at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility at NASA Ames Research Center, the solution is based on the SGI(R) InfiniteStorage Data Migration Facility (DMF). NASA will use the DMF solution to quickly and efficiently move older data files to a tape archive, making the much faster disk space self-managing.

The DMF implementation ultimately will allow the agency to archive and manage 40 Petabytes of information-an amount equal to approximately 2,000 times the size of the entire print collection of the U.S. Library of Congress.

"From satellite images of our home planet to simulating airflows over new wing designs, NASA research projects can regularly generate multiple Terabytes of data," said Alan Powers, high-end computing lead at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing facility. "As our archives grow, so does the challenge of managing and migrating that information to the appropriate storage system. A sophisticated data management facility is an essential enhancement to NASA, allowing us to keep the most requested information accessible when we need it, while efficiently moving the rest to tape archives for future use or reference."

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