Western Digital Performs Cloud-Scale Simulation Using AWS HPC and Amazon EC2 Spot Instances

Western Digital is a leading data infrastructure company that provides hard-disk drives (HDDs), solid state drives (SSDs), fabrics, and storage platforms. In the competitive HDD market, the company's R&D team constantly seeks to innovate and meet the demands of hyperscale data centers. One purpose for its research is to create the highest capacity drives with the best total cost of ownership (TCO) and get those drives to market sooner. When creating HDDs, Western Digital strives to find ways to pack ever-more data into the same-size form factor. The company investigates thousands of material combinations, rotational speeds, and operational characteristics, trying to find the optimal solution that will deliver the highest data density and fastest, most reliable read-write times.