ACCELERATE: ACADEMIC RESEARCH - Purdue University Delivers 900% Faster Access to Data, Delivering Accelerated Time to Results for 1,000 Researchers and 300 Projects with Powerful Storage and Advanced Caching Technology from DDN

Purdue University, a global leader in research, discovery, and innovation, faced the challenge of meeting the needs of up to 1,000 researchers working on several hundred projects. This drove the decision to deploy one large, centralized data repository powered by high-performance storage. The big data variety, velocity, and volume created the need for highly versatile, scalable storage. Diverse workloads required highly flexible storage to accommodate large parallel I/O jobs and many small, random read requests. The university initially looked at the needs of several top research areas, including computational nanotechnologies, aeronautical and astronomical engineering, mechanical engineering, genomics, structural biology, as well as several large projects in the life sciences disciplines. The challenge of managing varied research needs is accommodating both very large parallel I/O jobs and millions of small, random read requests without imposing performance penalties on anyone.

Purdue University is a global leader in research, discovery, and innovation. At the college’s West Lafayette, Ind., campus, more than 400 research laboratories and 140 university-approved research centers and institutes form a broad interdisciplinary research hub. Ranked No. 22 in the Best College Reviews of the top US research universities, Purdue is home to Discovery Park, a state-of-the-art facility with one-of-a-kind research and educational opportunities to catalyze and facilitate research breakthroughs for global impact. To fuel its multi-disciplinary research efforts, Purdue University has developed one of the nation’s largest campus cyberinfrastructures for research. Three of the university’s high-performance computing (HPC) systems are currently listed in the internationally known Top500® list, including the nation’s largest academic distributed computing grid and largest collection of science and medical online hubs. To ensure the highest levels of support for its various research initiatives, Purdue also has deployed a robust data repository, called the Data Depot.