NCSA, DDN Bringing New File System to NSF Community

The National Center for Supercomputing Applications is partnering with DataDirect Networks (DDN) to deploy three petabytes of the new DDN Infinia file system in its Delta and DeltaAI systems and offer improved data management abilities to the U.S. National Science Foundation research community.

Announced last month, DDN Infinia is a next-generation software-defined storage platform that combines multi-tenancy at scale, containerization and the highest levels of speed and efficiency with ease of management and powerful security attributes. The architecture accelerates and simplifies workflows for the data management demands of today’s researchers – from generative artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLM) to versatile and complex movements of workflows from the edge to data centers and the cloud.

Input-output constraints can significantly impact science workloads – especially including AI and machine learning – and their ability to run efficiently. In collaboration with DDN, the NCSA Delta team is working to ensure the new file system maneuvers these challenges, meets the needs of the NSF community and adheres to its open-science principles.

DDN Infinia allows NCSA to deploy a high-performance, quad-level cell-based storage tier leveraging commodity hardware for the open-science researchers on Delta and DeltaAI, while also bringing new capabilities for both scientists and systems engineers to better manage input-output of the next generation of open-science applications.

J.D. Maloney, NCSA Senior Research Storage Engineer

Delta is NCSA’s premier research computing system and the most performant GPU-computing resource in NSF’s portfolio. DeltaAI, an advanced computing and data resource that will be a companion system to Delta, will triple NCSA’s AI-focused computing capacity and greatly expand the capacity available within the NSF-funded nationwide ecosystem.

Read the November announcement for more information on DDN Infinia.