HPC integration specialists Boston has completed testing and certification of the Panasas ActiveStor Ultra product line, readying the turnkey HPC storage appliance for distribution to its customer base throughout the US, EMEA and APAC.
Boston is a distributor and integrator for ActiveStor Ultra, providing customised HPC product and service solutions including installation, configuration and support services globally.
The ActiveStor Ultra HPC appliance runs the PanFS parallel file system on Supermicro commercial off the shelf (COTS) hardware, using a carefully balanced set of HDDs, a SATA SSD, an NVMe SSD, DRAM, and an NVDIMM to deliver a fully integrated HPC storage solution that optimises performance and cost per GB.
PanFS uses Adaptive Small Component Acceleration (ASCA) to intelligently place files on the optimal storage tier based on file size, and adjusts dynamically as the workload evolves, meaning the system automatically adapts to workload and user changes without any tuning.
Boston CTO David Power said: “Panasas has changed the HPC storage landscape with the reengineered PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra delivered on Supermicro COTS hardware, by providing a combination of superior price performance and industry-leading reliability in a plug-and-play storage appliance.”
Boston confirmed the performance of the PanFS parallel file system on ActiveStor Ultra using Interleaved or Random (IOR) benchmarks and also ran real world application tests to verify production readiness of the Panasas solution. Using OpenFOAM Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software, Boston compared the execution times of 50 iterations of a 125 million cell external aerodynamics simulation. Analysis of the log files allowed the I/O performance to be separated from the compute time, showing that PanFS on ActiveStor Ultra outperformed a traditional network-attached storage (NAS) by a factor of four, practically halving the simulation run time and approaching speeds typically associated with non-resilient solid-state scratch systems.
Panasas Senior director, business development and global channels, Phil Crocker, said: “Boston’s strong technical skills combined with their reputation for delivering quality HPC solutions to their customers makes them an ideal partner for Panasas.”
ActiveStor Ultra Special Offer – 2PB, 20GB/S, 200k € or £175k Boston is offering the ActiveStor Ultra HPC storage appliance for an introductory price of 200.000 € or £175,000 for 2PB and 20GB/s through September 30, 2020, including three years of support.
