Los Alamos Lab Picks
Panasas for Data Storage

Los Alamos National Laboratory has turned to a Silicon Valley start-up for a massive data-storage system that is a sign of progress in addressing a looming problem in scientific computing.

The nuclear-weapons lab selected Panasas Inc., a closely held company in Fremont, Calif., to install hardware that can store at least 120 trillion bytes of information, with an option to add capacity for as many as 500 trillion more. Panasas's products will connect to a supercomputer dubbed Lightning, one of the largest machines ever built using commodity computer chips and the Linux operating system.

Such machines, called clusters, are a fast-growing niche in a generally sluggish market for high-end computers and the storage systems used with them. They are constructed from hundreds or thousands of circuit boards, each containing one or two microprocessors of the sort found in personal computers. Clusters are reducing sharply the cost of scientific-computing chores and rapidly moving into commercial applications.

But conventional storage systems weren't designed to deliver files to so many processors, which may sit idle as they wait for data. That bottleneck prompted the formation of Panasas and other start-ups, which are devising parallel data pathways between the disk drives and microprocessors. They are developing software that packages pieces of data in special bundles, called objects, that can be stored and retrieved easily on hundreds of disk drives.

This "object-oriented" approach is spawning storage hardware that looks very much like clusters. Panasas's devices are composed of racks of circuit boards that each have two disk drives and an Intel Corp. microprocessor.

The company estimates that its hardware offers seven to 30 times the performance of conventional systems, and can scale enormous sizes. The Los Alamos installation includes as many as 2,400 disk drives, which will exchange data with the 2,816 Advanced Micro Devices Inc. processors on the Lightning supercomputer. The contract is valued at $2.6 million.

"It looks very promising to us," said John Morrison, who leads computing, communications and networking operations at Los Alamos. "We think it's going to address one of the big missing pieces in building Linux clusters."

Another fan of the object-oriented approach is Josh Harr, chief technology officer of Linux Networx, a closely held Bluffdale, Utah, company that is constructing the supercomputer for the lab. "I think it is going to have an enormous impact, going beyond high-performance computing," he said.

Rivals are moving in the same direction, including International Business Machines Corp. and EMC Corp., and start-ups such as Permabit Inc., of Cambridge, Mass., and Cluster File Systems Inc., a Mountain View, Calif., company that has been backing a file system called Lustre being used at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.

Other start-ups, such as BlueArc Corp., simply are accelerating traditional storage systems. Gianluca Rattazzi, chief executive officer of that San Jose, Calif., company, argues that Panasas may be limited to scientific installations because special software must be installed on each processor that taps into a cluster.

Panasas, founded by former Carnegie Mellon University researcher Garth Gibson, has raised $72.5 million from investors that include Intel and Menlo Park, Calif., venture-capital firm Mohr, Davidow Ventures. Its CEO is Rod Schrock, a former Compaq Computer Corp. executive who helped build that company's server business.

Write to Don Clark at don.clark@wsj.com

Updated October 20, 2003 12:08 a.m.