Episode 101 | How Vanderbilt Slashed Millions In Storage Costs & Boosted HPC Performance w/ Hunter Hagewood

In this Supercomputing 25 edition of Data Unchained, host Molly Presley talks with Hunter Hagewood of Vanderbilt University’s ACCRE research computing center about the urgent storage and performance challenges that pushed Vanderbilt to rethink its entire HPC strategy. Hunter explains how procurement delays, faculty chargeback pressures, millions of small medical imaging files, manual GPU data staging, and rapidly growing research datasets created a breaking point that traditional appliance based storage could not solve. He shares how Hammer Space helped eliminate 20 percent of workloads that were bottlenecking the cluster, enabled modular growth at scale, improved GPU performance for AI driven workflows, and positioned Vanderbilt to save nearly two million dollars over four years while supporting future research expansion.