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Advanced HPC Announces its Exclusive Platinum Partnership with BeeGFS

Advanced HPC Announces its Exclusive Platinum Partnership with BeeGFS

August 1, 2018

Contact (Europe):
Marco Merkel, Vice President Worldwide Sales
+49 1590 4046964; Marco.Merkel@thinkparq.com

Company is the first in the U.S. to Become a Platinum Partner for the Global BeeGFS Parallel Cluster File System

San Diego, CA – AdvancedHPC, a leading HPC specialist and solutions provider, announced today that it has become the first and only U.S. Platinum Partner of BeeGFS, the globally-renowned parallel cluster file system.

The BeeGFS system is designed to manage demanding workloads and provide superior performance in critical environments. It is known for its scalability, flexibility and ease of access to a wide variety of storage systems, from small clusters to enterprise-class computer systems with thousands of hosts. BeeGFS helps customers to increase productivity by delivering faster results and enabling new data analysis methods that were not previously possible.

By achieving Platinum status for BeeGFS, Advanced HPC is able to offer the parallel file system with highly competitive pricing and best-in-class support. Additionally, Advanced HPC’s extensive history, expertise and training with BeeGFS enables the company to deliver wholly unique, customized solutions.

ThinkParQ, the Germany company behind BeeGFS, designed the parallel cluster file system based
on the POSIX files systems interface, which means applications do not have to be rewritten or modified to take advantage of BeeGFS. Advanced HPC has the most experience of any company in the U.S. in implementing BeeGFS, which led to the Platinum BeeGFS partner status.

“We are very proud to have Advanced HPC as the world’s first BeeGFS Platinum partner in the U.S.,” said Frank Herold, CEO of ThinkParQ. “Advanced HPC is building high quality BeeGFS turnkey solutions for HPC and cognitive customers. During this past year, we have seen an outstanding level of customer satisfaction and systems that have regularly exceeded customer expectations.”

Among those satisfied customers is Christopher Paolini, Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at San Diego State University.

“Scientists now require petascale storage capacity systems to accelerate data intensive discovery in science and engineering, and the BeeGFS parallel cluster file system from ThinkParQ excels in performance for I/O intensive workloads by improving the runtime of I/O bound computation,” said Paolini. “Advanced HPC built a BeeGFS system that was tailored to our needs and funding constraints. We received a National Science Foundation (NSF) storage grant to fund the acquisition of a petascale storage capacity system for our research.”

Paolini added, “SDSU’s partnership with Advanced HPC has been fantastic and we are quite impressed with Advanced HPC’s ability to build, configure, and tune the BeeGFS file server in their lab, deliver it on time, and help us install it in our computational science data center.”

BeeGFS is based on a lightweight architecture and can be created on a per job basis with the BeeOND (BeeGFS On Demand) application, which aggregates the performance capacity of internal SSDs or hard disks in compute nodes. With performance-centric highly available data increasing in demand, a flexible architecture like BeeGFS eliminates data silos and storage complexity with a solution built specifically for multi-tenancy and cloud.

“BeeGFS allows us to deliver the world’s fastest storage, eliminating bottlenecks and ensuring our customers’ HPC environments perform at their peak potential,” said Joe Lipman, Advanced HPC Senior Sales Engineer.

BeeGFS is feature rich and offers:

  • A wide variety of Linux distributions such as RHEL/Fedora, SLES/OpenSuse or Debian/Ubuntu, as well as a range of Linux kernels from 2.6.18 up to the latest vanilla kernels.
  • Flexibility for use on any hardware/software configuration. (Advanced HPC can build-out as needed.)
  • Complete multi-market/multi-vertical compatibility, including those in which Advanced HPC specializes (i.e., Enterprise, Life Sciences, Defense, Higher Education and Federal Government).
  • Additional Enterprise features (high availability, quota enforcement, and Access Control Lists) that are also included for testing and can be enabled for production by establishing a support contract with ThinkParQ.
  • Ideal alignment with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML) and deep learning (DL) applications. Moreover, because of its seamless scalability, BeeGFS is the perfect parallel cluster file system for AI startups in growth mode.

Christopher M. Sullivan is the Assistant Director for Biocomputing at Oregon State University and directs the Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB). He says BeeGFS has given CGRB a way to distribute their research across a parallel system while keeping the storage space looking like a single container. “BeeGFS is a robust solution that expands our storage space, gives us higher performance with phenomenal management and all at a cost-effective price.”

Sullivan continued, “I value the relationship with Advanced HPC because they keep moving forward with new technology at prices that allow my research team to move without bounds. Additionally, the support we have received from Advanced HPC has helped us expand into cutting-edge research that we weren’t able to do before.”

For more information on implementing the BeeGFS parallel cluster file system, contact an Advanced HPC sales engineer at 858-716-8262.

About Advanced HPC
Combining its best-in-class technical expertise with proven industry experience, Advanced HPC understands customers’ specific industry needs and is adept at developing, deploying and supporting the right high-performance compute and storage solutions unique to those respective markets. For more information, visit the Advanced HPC website and Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and Instagram pages.

About BeeGFS
BeeGFS is a leading parallel cluster file system, designed specifically to manage I/O intensive workloads in performance-critical environments. Earning global acclaim from leading enterprises, universities and researchers for ease of installation, maximum scalability, robustness and exceptional flexibility – including converged setups where storage servers are also used for compute jobs – BeeGFS increases productivity by delivering results faster and enabling new data analysis methods that were not possible before its inception.

BeeGFS transparently spreads user data across multiple servers. By increasing the number of servers and disks in the system, users seamlessly scale performance and capacity to the level needed, from small clusters to enterprise-class computer systems with thousands of nodes. Finally, BeeOND (i.e., BeeGFS on demand) allows “on the fly” creation of a complete parallel file system on a given set of hosts with just one single command.

BeeGFS is available for download free from www.beegfs.com. Professional support is available from ThinkParQ (https://thinkparq.com).

About ThinkParQ
ThinkParQ was founded as a spin-off from the Fraunhofer Center for High Performance Computing by the key people behind BeeGFS to bring fast, robust, scalable storage to market. ThinkParQ is responsible for support, provides consulting, organizes and attends events, and works together with system integrators to create turnkey solutions.

ThinkParQ and Fraunhofer internally cooperate closely to deliver high quality support services and to drive further development and optimization of BeeGFS for tomorrow’s performance-critical systems. Visit https://thinkparq.com to learn more about the company.