DOE sponsors a petascale storage institute

Among the winners of the Department of Energy’s $60 million bonanza giveaway to 30 computational scientific projects, announced earlier this month (see the DOE’s press release), is 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, according to a press release from storage company Panasas. Panasas’ CTO, Garth Gibson, who is also an associate professor of computer science and electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, will be the top cheese at the Petascale Institute. Joining Gibson at the institute will be computer scientists from UC Santa Cruz and the University of Michigan, plus researchers from the DOE’s Los Alamos, Sandia, Oak Ridge, Lawrence Berkeley and Pacific Northwest national labs. According to Panasas, the 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.” Linda Leung, lleung@nww.com