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

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

From Data Unchained by Hammerspace

December 3, 2025 · 12 min · Episode 101

About this episode

Molly Presley interviews Hunter Hagewood about Vanderbilt University's innovative HPC strategy that reduced storage costs and improved performance.

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 the 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. Cyberpunk by jiglr | https://soundcloud.com/jiglrmusic Music promoted by https://www.free-stock-music.com Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/deed.en_US Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

People in this episode

Host: Molly Presley

Guest: Hunter Hagewood

Topics covered

  • HPC strategy
  • storage costs
  • performance challenges
  • medical imaging
  • AI workflows
  • research expansion

Keywords

  • HPC
  • storage costs
  • GPU performance
  • medical imaging
  • research datasets
  • Hammer Space
  • Vanderbilt University

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Vanderbilt University, ACCRE, Hammer Space

Places: Vanderbilt

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