
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
More episodes of Data Unchained
- Is the Data Migration Nightmare Finally Over? w/ Pradnesh Patil · May 29, 2026 · 40 min
- Is Science Next in the AI Disruption Cycle? w/ Kevin Moore · May 15, 2026 · 41 min
- AI Has Data Problem Supercomputers Already Solved w/ Mike Heroux · May 1, 2026 · 39 min
- Wrong Data In, Disaster Out: The Data Problem That Could Wreck Your AI Strategy w/ Mike Seashols & Floyd Christofferson · April 17, 2026 · 49 min
- The Future of AI Will Belong to Companies That Make Data AI-Ready Now w/ Jack Hogan · April 3, 2026 · 46 min
- Global Namespace for Precision Medicine: The Data Breakthrough w/ William Baird · March 20, 2026 · 12 min
Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the Data Unchained podcast page.