Panasas parallel storage brings HPC storage features to Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) applications in manufacturing environments. The combination of scalable application software and commodity compute clusters that leverage Panasas® ActiveStor® scale-out NAS technology has resulted in significant productivity advantages for CAE workflows. The benefits range from compelling cost/performance improvements to time-saving, high-fidelity simulation.

1. CAE simulations for design optimization,
and Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI). These
tools are used to design everything from
aircraft and automobiles to beer bottles
and potato chip containers. Fast access to
shared data sets allows simulation experts,
product analysts, design engineers and
verification and certification teams to oper-
ate at peak efficiency as they pursue their
state-of-the-art designs.
Panasas ActiveStor Scale-out
NAS Solution
Panasas ActiveStor is a complete solution
combining advanced, blade-based hard-
ware architecture with a fully integrated
parallel file system designed for high per-
formance technical computing workloads.
Just as compute clusters distribute CAE
workflows evenly across many compute
nodes, ActiveStor evenly distributes shared
data sets across a large number of storage
devices and allows even thousands of con-
current compute nodes to access all storage
devices directly and in parallel, eliminating
the bottlenecks associated with legacy
architectures.
Panasas has strong alliances with many
CAE industry leaders including Altair,
ANSYS, CD-adapco, ESI, LSTC, Metacomp,
MSC Software, and SIMULIA. In several
cases, Panasas engineers have worked
closely with ISVs to improve the parallelism
of their CAE tools, enabling them to reach
new levels of performance. For example,
ANSYS®
Fluent 12 includes a parallel I/O
mode that recognizes and takes full advan-
tage of Panasas storage. Leveraging parallel
I/O results in an over three times speed-up
in write performance, as proven by the
Truck-111m application benchmark.
Accelerating Design
in M a nufac t uring En v ir onmen t s
Panasas parallel storage brings HPC storage
features to Computer Aided Engineering
(CAE) applications in manufacturing envi-
ronments. The combination of scalable ap-
plication software and commodity compute
clusters that leverage Panasas®
ActiveStor®
scale-out NAS technology has resulted in
significant productivity advantages for CAE
workflows. The benefits range from com-
pelling cost/performance improvements
to time-saving, high-fidelity simulation.
Overcoming I/O Bottlenecks
in CAE Workflows
Product design teams are increasingly run-
ning their CAE workloads on cost-effective
commodity HPC clusters instead of worksta-
tions, allowing their models and simulations
to become much more realistic. From a data
storage perspective, this means the need for
shared storage capable of high throughput
without the stifling I/O bottlenecks associ-
ated with legacy Network Attached Storage
(NAS) architectures.
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C F D | F E A | E D A S i m u l a t i o n | O p t i ca l C o r r ec t i o n | T h e r m a l Mec h a n i cs
1.888.PANASAS | www.panasas.com
NAS systems offer important advantages
such as shared storage and simplified IT ad-
ministration, yet the significant performance
scalability limitations associated with legacy
NAS systems can seriously dampen the ef-
fectiveness of leveraging cluster computing
for CAE simulations. When workflows get
bogged down because of a serialization
of I/O, fewer simulations can be completed
on schedule and/or simulation resolutions
must be decreased to compensate. What’s
needed instead is a scale-out, parallel stor-
age system that frees these constraints and
allows storage I/O to scale in tandem with
the size of the compute cluster.
Panasas ActiveStor scale-out NAS systems
deliver the highest performance along with
linear scalability, reducing time-to-design
by optimizing the performance of CAE ap-
plications used for Finite Element Analysis
(FEA), high-fidelity transient Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD), Large Eddy Simula-
tion (LES), aeroacoustics, dynamic response
analysis, parameterized non-deterministic
Job profile—Solver vs.
Write (Data File)
Panasas partnered with ANSYS to
benchmark three I/O models typi-
cally seen in compute clusters–NFS,
Serial I/O (I/O is performed by head
node), and Parallel I/O (all compute
nodes participate in I/O). NFS and
Serial I/O-based solutions are highly
inefficient for HPC clusters due to
architecture bottlenecks (NFS server
and head node, respectively). Paral-
lel I/O dramatically reduces the time
spent in write phase by eliminating
these I/O bottlenecks.

2. © 2013 Panasas, Inc. All rights reserved. Panasas, the Panasas logo, ActiveStor, PanFS and DirectFlow are trademarks or registered trademarks of Panasas, Inc., in the U.S.
and/or other countries. All other trademarks, registered trademarks, trade names, company names and service marks are the respective properties of their holders.
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ontact
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04222013
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Extreme Performance
with SSD/SATA Tier
Lightning-fast response time and paral-
lel access for massive throughput. High-
speed SSDs for fast access to metadata
and small files and high capacity SATA
for large file performance.
Scalability
System scales to 8PB and 150GB/s,
or 1.4M IOPS of aggregate perfor-
mance, accessed by as many as 12,000
clients. Performance scales near-linearly
with capacity.
Easy Management
Single point of management via GUI
or CLI. Capacity expansion without
downtime. System set up in under
ten minutes.
Unsurpassed Data Protection
Object RAID delivers high reliability
and the fastest RAID rebuilds available.
Compelling TCO
Outstanding price/performance, invest-
ment protection, utilization rates and
simplified management.
SOLUTION HIGHLIGHTS
Panasas Parallel File System
The integrated PanFS®
parallel file system
delivers performance by spreading I/O
across all of the available resources, and
when new storage is added, PanFS auto-
matically distributes the workload over the
new, larger pool. In this way ActiveStor is
able to easily grow both performance and
capacity linearly as requirements dictate.
Data Protection
Asset protection is at the heart of PanFS,
safeguarding files with object RAID where
files are stored as objects, distributed
across all of the hardware elements. PanFS
uses multiple techniques to avoid the per-
formance degradation and risk to content
in the event of a component failure.
Panasas ActiveStor is a file-based, high performance,
scale-out NAS solution that optimally supports CAE
workflows. ActiveStor 14 intelligently combines high
performance Solid State Drives (SSDs) and cost-
effective hard disk storage to deliver a solution that
is fully optimized for the mixed workloads so often
found in manufacturing design environments. It pro-
vides high streaming throughput for large files and
high performance for small files, critical to a smooth
and efficient workflow. ActiveStor is equally strong
in ease of use and management, with initial installs
and online scaling of capacity and performance
taking under 10 minutes.
PANASAS ACTIVESTOR
THE WORLD’S FASTEST HPC STORAGE SYSTEM