DDN and Sandia National Laboratories collaborate

This deep-seated collaboration ensured that DDN Infinia would not only meet the demands of Sandia’s traditional large-scale simulation and modeling HPC use cases such as defensive checkpoint restart, but also extend to broader Department of Energy and Government Lab ecosystem and application needs in the future.

“Working with DDN to influence the capabilities of its data management platform for our wide range of interfaces with different usage requirements addresses interesting challenges,” said James Laros, Distinguished Member of Technical Staff, Sandia National Laboratories. “The open collaboration has been extremely beneficial, allowing us to minimize system complexity and create interoperability between our current and future workflows. DDN has been a trusted technology partner, demonstrating it can handle today’s data requirements with the ability to scale and troubleshoot potential data needs of tomorrow.”

The collaboration with DDN resides under the Sandia Vanguard program which is an extension of Sandia’s Advanced Architecture Testbed project under the Advanced Simulation and Computing program aimed at expanding the HPC ecosystem by evaluating and accelerating the development of emerging technologies in order to increase their viability for future large-scale production platforms.

“One of the most challenging aspects of HPC is providing high-performance filesystems to meet the demands of large-scale and highly data-intensive workloads,” said Matthew Curry, a principal computer scientist, Sandia National Laboratories. “Our ongoing collaboration with DDN and the technology leaders from NNSA allows us to tailor and integrate the robust data management features that DDN Infinia offers into our traditional HPC environment with the flexibility to support our advanced workflows as we integrate cloud, AI and ML in the future.”

Technology leadership from the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) and other labs were heavily involved in the feedback for the platform’s development to ensure crucial feedback from all levels was implemented for optimal functionality.

“The NNSA’s post-Exascale-Computing-Initiative investment portfolio has the objective of sustaining our research and development momentum and building strong engagements with industry partners,” said Andrew Younge, R&D manager, Sandia National Laboratories. “The collaboration with DDN provides us with the opportunity to influence the design of systems at an early stage to leverage next-generation high-performance computing technologies.”

The explosive growth of data, especially unstructured data, combined with the need for flexibility between cloud, data center and edge computing, has organizations keenly looking for a scalable, reliable and cost-effective means of managing and extracting value from that data, regardless of where it might reside.

DDN Infinia is a software-defined, multi-protocol data storage solution which solves these challenges for a variety of use cases including AI, HPC, and other data intensive industries. Unlike existing storage solutions, which are complex to scale and lack in performance, DDN Infinia offers a simple approach to managing multi-petabyte capacities on premises, at the edge, and in the cloud with guaranteed multi-tenant QoS with the industry’s most robust security implementation.

“DDN is committed to delivering powerful storage solutions that can handle the needs of the world’s most data intensive and challenging workloads,” said Sven Oehme, CTO, DDN. “Designed to simplify distributed data management and governance for all workloads, DDN Infinia helps organizations future-proof their storage strategy and keeps their infrastructures working, enabling businesses to produce at a maximum. Our collaboration with Sandia has allowed us to further expand DDN Infinia’s data management capabilities that will meet their complex requirements today and well into the future.”