Dr. Garth Gibson to Lead Petascale Data Storage Institute

FREMONT, Calif., Sept. 14 /PRNewswire/ -- The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has awarded a five-year, $11 million grant to academic researchers and leading industry experts to build a computing infrastructure for next- generation supercomputers. Among the industry experts is Garth Gibson, Panasas CTO and Associate Professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who will be the lead principle investigator in the Petascale Data Storage Institute. The DOE- sponsored Institute will tackle the data storage issues and technologies that will be critical for the next generation of advanced computing systems.

In addition to CMU's Gibson, the Institute has tapped the talents of computer scientists at the University of California at Santa Cruz and the University of Michigan, along with those at the DOE's Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley and Pacific Northwest national laboratories. Gibson is an associate professor of Computer Science and Electrical and Computer Engineering at CMU. While there, he established the university's Parallel Data Lab where extensive research has been conducted on disk array architectures, parallel file system processing, and storage networking and security.

The collaborative efforts of the DOE-sponsored Institute will create a data storage framework that will drive next-generation computing systems. These petascale supercomputers are expected to be 1,000 times faster than today's terascale supercomputers. When available, petascale computing will make it possible to solve some of the most challenging research problems -- ranging from understanding the causes of life-threatening diseases to new weather forecasting systems that simulate global climate changes with greater accuracy -- that require complex simulations that even today's fastest supercomputers have been unable to perform.

Gibson, who is a founder and chief technology officer at Panasas, is a recognized authority on high performance computing (HPC) and data storage technologies. His pioneering work with network storage and parallel file systems is responsible for RAID (Redundant Array of Inexpensive Disks) that is now a de facto design feature for all enterprise storage industry products. Last month, Gibson delivered the keynote address at the High Performance Computing Conference at Stanford University where he focused on the importance of next-generation storage architecture as one of the key drivers that will be needed to achieve the performance and scalability requirements for petascale computing.

"We are pleased that Garth Gibson is recognized as a visionary in data storage technologies and can lead the development of a roadmap for HPC storage architectures for next-generation supercomputers," said Victor Perez, president and chief executive officer at Panasas. "Garth's leadership will contribute greatly to the delivery of a high performance, robust total solution that will have a meaningful impact to people and companies around the globe."

The DOE's Petascale Data Storage Institute will focus its research efforts in three areas: collect field data on computer failure rates and application behaviors, establish a knowledge base and disseminate best practices and standards, and develop an innovative system of solutions that will manage petascale computing storage. The latter area could also include "self star" systems where computers will manage other computers. The Institute is part of a larger $60 million DOE Scientific Discovery Through Advanced Computing (SciDAC) project. SciDAC develops new tools and techniques for computational modeling and simulation.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc. helps companies accelerate the speed and accuracy of their business decisions, leading to real world breakthroughs that improve people's lives. Panasas enables customers to maximize the benefits of Linux clusters by breaking down the storage bottleneck created by legacy network storage technologies. Through the delivery of the company's Storage Cluster platform, which combines industry-standard hardware with the company's ActiveScale File System and professional services, the company has become the established leader in object-based, clustered storage. Panasas is headquartered in Fremont, Calif., with development facilities in Pittsburgh, Pa. For more information, please visit http://www.panasas.com.