Press Release
TECH-X SELECTS TERASCALA RTS 1000 STORAGE APPLIANCE
High Capacity, Throughput Storage Appliance Makes Large Simulations Possible
AVON, Mass. – June 11, 2009 - Terascala, Inc., a provider of high throughput, high capacity storage appliances today announced that Tech-X Corporation has chosen the Terascala RTS 1000 Storage Appliance to speed code development and to enable large simulations.
Based in Boulder, Colorado, Tech-X develops software solutions for research, engineering and education to aid with specific scientific challenges. Tech-X Corporation offers commercial products as well as collaborates with government and private institutions on research projects. Products and services from Tech-X help solve difficult technical problems, increasing design and development productivity and accelerating project deployment for scientists and engineers.
Tech-X will use the RTS 1000 storage appliance to use in code development for its VORPAL software and to run simulations using VORPAL for Tech-X customers around the world. VORPAL is a cross-platform framework capable of large-scale, massively-parallel simulations of electromagnetic and electrostatic phenomena, modeling fields, particles, and fluids in one, two, or three dimensions. VORPAL offers a unique combination of physical models to cover the entire range of plasma simulation problems. Plasma processing chambers, plasma thrusters, particle accelerators, and high-power microwave guides are only a few of the many applications benefiting from the powerful, parallel algorithms incorporated into the VORPAL framework. World-class research organizations such as Tokyo Electron America, Inc, Lockheed Martin, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the University of Colorado at Boulder are actively using VORPAL in research. VORPAL is designed to run as both a serial code for single-processor workstations and as a parallel code for systems that support MPI. Domain decomposition techniques employed in the code enable static and dynamic load balancing. Strong scaling on several thousands of processors has been achieved for VORPAL simulations. The use of parallel I/O yields high performance even when thousands of processors are dumping large amounts of data.
Tech-X had been running simulations using an NFS system but wanted to find a solution that would enable the company to run larger and longer simulations for both internal development and for corporate customers and scientific institutions worldwide.
“Some of the data files we generate can be huge and we need to perform multiple steps to complete the simulations. The Terascala RTS 1000 gives us the high throughput we need to perform larger and longer simulations,” said Anne Hammond, director of information technology at Tech-X. “We also liked the fact that the RTS 1000 came delivered as a working appliance. We have a small, agile staff and they were able to get the system up and running very quickly and didn’t they have to worry about the technical details.”
Larry Genovesi, president and CEO of Terascala said, “The RTS 1000’s appliance packaging enables organizations like Tech-X to quickly add high capacity, high throughput storage for both new and existing applications. The RTS 1000 is cost-effective to acquire and is easy to deploy and manage, which lowers operational costs even further.”
A detailed case study is available on the Terascala website.
About Terascala
Terascala develops high throughput, high capacity, cost-effective parallel storage appliances. Delivering data over either Ethernet or InfiniBand networks and leveraging the open source Lustre® file system, Terascala’s unique storage appliance approach is changing the dynamics of the performance driven computing market, enabling existing users to do more for less while enabling new users to maximize the capabilities of their processing infrastructure.