1 July 2020 - - Researchers at the California-based microbiome research organization UC San Diego Center for Microbiome Innovation have expanded their Panasas high-performance computing storage infrastructure with an additional two petabytes of ActiveStor data storage to support the growing number of I/O-intensive tasks related to COVID-19 research, the organization said.

In recent months, CMI began redirecting many of its efforts to better understand how the human microbiome is involved in the development and severity of COVID-19.

Researchers have since been evaluating samples from patients worldwide to find biological and epidemiological discoveries about the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

CMI director Rob Knight also noted the importance of a reliable HPC technology solution as the Center steps up its groundbreaking efforts to study the RNA microbiome, which is especially relevant because COVID-19 is an RNA virus.

CMI has been working with Panasas since 2015, when they were looking to create an HPC storage infrastructure that could deliver consistently high performance, speed data exploration and discovery, and simplify storage management for administrators.

The CMI team appreciates technology solutions that don't distract researchers from the scientific problems they aspire to solve. By freeing researchers from worries about storage, CMI can accelerate the adoption of advanced scientific technologies.

ActiveStor is a turnkey HPC storage appliance that runs the PanFS parallel file system to accelerate performance at every stage of the computational research process.

It delivers unlimited performance scaling and features a balanced node architecture that prevents hot spots and bottlenecks by automatically adapting to dynamically changing workloads and increasing demands - all at the industry's lowest total cost of ownership.

Panasas delivers high-performance computing data storage solutions that support industry and research innovation around the world.