Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and computing giant Silicon Graphics Inc. have formed a research partnership to design data storage systems that can do computations at the same time.

That's the idea behind the "active storage" partnership announced Tuesday, which PNNL researchers believe could offer dramatic improvements in computing tasks that require crunching lots and lots of data.

"The reason we're starting to see this as a need is because hard drives aren't keeping up with the speed of processors," said Scott Studham, associate director of advanced computing at PNNL.

Traditional data storage systems today break up data into parts to store it on hard drives, he explained. To manipulate that data, processors must "pull" it off the hard drives and put it back together in processors, which do the calculations and other data manipulations.

For data-intensive computing tasks, like analyzing reams of scientific data or creating computer animation for films, the bottlenecks created by slow hard drive data retrieval can waste time and money, Studham explained.

"Instead of that, why not analyze the data inside the file system?" he asked.

With the newly formed partnership with Silicon Graphics, PNNL researchers will spend the next year or so designing software to do just that.

The data storage systems use a open-source "object-based" file system known as Lustre, which allows software engineers to manipulate the data.

PNNL didn't disclose the terms of the deal, but Silicon Graphics' contribution will go toward paying software developers at work on the project.

To get a sense of how much data researchers are talking about, consider that PNNL recently signed a different contract for $4.9 million with Silicon Graphics for the company to build a Lustre-based file system capable of storing 1.3 petabytes, or 1.3 billion megabytes.

"That's a lot of data," Studham said. PNNL's long-standing research in data storage and high-performance computing made it a natural for the partnership, he said.

"We have a working prototype right now," one used for PNNL's research into proteomics, or the proteins that carry out functions in cells. "What we're doing with SGI (Silicon Graphics) is exploring it in other industries."

The goal of the partnership is to create active storage devices for the broader market, Studham said.

"SGI has a much larger market than the lab does," he said. "The idea is, how do we take the technology we have and make it available to a larger audience?"