Sandia National Laboratory in Albuquerque, New Mexico, recently installed an SGI InfiniteStorage 4600 solution capable of housing more than 1.8 Petabytes (or 1.8 million Gigabytes) of scientific data. The system provides the extreme data throughput required for high-speed, distributed access to data, a must-have capability in supercomputing environments where the amount of data - and the power needed to process it - is rapidly increasing.

Sandia scientists evaluate the safety and operational effectiveness of thousands of nuclear warheads using advanced techniques to model the entire lifecycle of a nuclear weapon. These large-scale simulations allow scientists to understand the lifecycle of nuclear stockpiles without resorting to underground detonations. The simulations put enormous demands on the storage environment at Sandia, a facility of the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Energy Administration.

The Sandia storage environment is comprised of 17 InfiniteStorage 4600 systems, based on the seventh-generation LSI XBB2 architecture, and is designed to reach a sustained data exchange rate of 72 Gigabytes per second. This, combined with the system's high reliability features, makes the Silicon Graphics storage platform ideal for highly demanding workloads.

Sandia purchased the systems via a contract with Abba Technologies (www.abbatech.com), a Silicon Graphics solutions integrator based in Albuquerque.

"Few endeavours in science are more crucial than evaluating the nuclear arsenal for safety, security, and reliability, and that's the mission of Sandia National Laboratory", stated Kurt Kuckein, RAID product line manager, Silicon Graphics. "Silicon Graphics is proud to work with LSI and Abba Technologies to deliver a high-performance storage solution that will reliably meet Sandia's needs today, while providing the scalability to meet its evolving needs years from now."

"The LSI XBB2 storage system architecture is ideally suited to meet the storage performance demands of Sandia's nuclear simulations", stated Steve Hochberg, senior director, HPC segment, LSI. "With nearly 400,000 LSI-based storage systems deployed in HPC environments worldwide through our OEM customers, LSI is trusted by market-leading OEMs such as Silicon Graphics to deliver the superior performance and reliability needed to meet their customers' storage requirements."