ALICE Supercomputer Runs Computationally Intensive Research With Panasas High Performance Storage

SUNNYVALE, California, June 1, 2011 -

- Panasas(R) ActiveStor(TM) Storage and PanFS(TM) Parallel File System
Deployed Within Private Cloud at the University of Leicester in the UK

Panasas, Inc. (www.panasas.com), the leader in high performance
parallel storage for technical computing applications and big data workloads,
today announced that the University of Leicester has consolidated its HPC
capabilities into a private cloud infrastructure with Panasas ActiveStor
(www.panasas.com/products/pas-12.php), a high performance parallel
storage system running over 10GbE and InfiniBand. The centralized
supercomputer, Advanced Leicester Information and Computational Environment
(ALICE) (www2.le.ac.uk/offices/itservices/resources/is/rcs/hpc/alice),
allows multi-disciplinary researchers to run computationally intensive
research projects quickly and efficiently while resulting in significant cost
savings for the university.

"Academic departments typically struggle to secure research funding to
employ skilled IT support staff simply to administer their HPC systems," said
Dr. Chris Rudge, facility manager for the UK Astrophysics Fluids Facility at
Leicester University, who was tasked with creating the centralized
supercomputing facility. "Panasas storage performance and manageability were
the key reasons that the University of Leicester chose Panasas for ALICE.
Benchmarking during the tender process demonstrated clearly that Panasas
offered the best performance both on a per-node basis and also without
degradation of the aggregate performance with access from multiple nodes."

Prior to ALICE, Leicester's researchers utilized custom HPC clusters
scattered throughout the campus. The new system had to scale out performance
on a single system and be both reliable and easy to use, particularly for
academics who do not have expertise in managing HPC clusters. By
consolidating its high performance storage and compute resources into a
centralized private cloud, the university avoided the cost of
over-provisioning individual HPC clusters to meet the demands of peak
workloads. The private cloud allows researchers to test new ideas with
smaller problem sizes, as well as perform a small number of large runs that
leverage all 2,048 of ALICE's processing cores. With Panasas, researchers are
achieving significantly higher performance for computationally intensive
projects including physics, engineering, chemistry and astronomy - all within
a single, global namespace.

"Panasas ActiveStor and the PanFS operating system are built to support
compute-intensive workloads, while keeping management simple so people can
focus on the research and not the system," said Barbara Murphy, chief
marketing officer of Panasas. "At the University of Leicester, economists
model the world's stock markets, geneticists analyze genome sequences, and
astrophysicists model star formation. Panasas is pleased to be part of the
ALICE supercomputing environment supporting these and other research
endeavors."

Panasas ActiveStor is a high performance storage system that brings
plug-and-play simplicity to large-scale storage deployments while pushing
aggregate performance to 150GB/s - the industry's ultimate system throughput
per gigabyte of storage. Panasas provides scalability, cost-effective
performance, reliability, flexibility, and critical ease-of-use needed to
support expansion within a limited project budget. With features like user
quotas and per-user charge back, Panasas ActiveStor is optimized for a shared
cloud environment.

About Panasas

Panasas, Inc., the leader in high-performance parallel storage for
technical computing applications and big data workloads, enables customers to
rapidly solve complex computing problems, speed innovation and accelerate new
product introduction. All Panasas storage products leverage the patented
PanFS(TM) storage operating system to deliver superior performance, data
protection, scalability and manageability. Panasas systems are optimized for
demanding storage environments in the energy, government, finance,
manufacturing, bioscience and higher education industries. For more
information, visit www.panasas.com.

(c)2011 Panasas, Inc. Panasas, the Panasas logo, ActiveStor, and PanFS
are registered trademarks or trademarks of Panasas, Inc. All other trademarks
are property of their respective holders.

James McIntyre of McClenahan Bruer Communications, www.mcbru.com, +1-503-546-1000, panasas at mcbru.com, for Panasas, Inc.