Wired reports:
And this week, the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) officially
plugged in the first supercomputer that uses flash storage rather than
good old-fashioned spinning disks.
Gordon uses 300 terabytes of flash, spanning 1,024 high-performance
Intel 710 series drives, and the system includes new software designed
to aggregate resources from multiple physical server nodes into
“super-nodes,” so users have immediate access to data, rather than
waiting for the system to access particular drives.
According to Snavely, Gordon can run massive databases up to 10 times
faster than traditional memory, and it now ranks 48th on the official
Top500 list of the fastest supercomputer in the world.
When it officially becomes a research tool on New Year’s Day, Gordon
will have 16,384 compute cores and a theoretical peak performance of 340
Teraflops per second. Its aggregate flash memory will be able to read
and write at just over 200GB per second.
They worked with Intel Chief Technology Officer for High-Performance
Computing Ecosystems Mark Seager, who predicted that “this kind of
technology is going to be adapted into the wider market.”
Gordon utilizes a unique architecture, designed by ScaleMP, where a
supernode that aggregates 32 of Gordon’s servers and two I/O servers
into a single virtual cache so “it can be used without putting too much
brain into using it,” according to Rob Pennington, of the National
Science Foundation.
Bob Sinkovits, applications lead for the Gordon project at SDSC, says
that using flash memory is just a better idea. “Flash memory has a
number of advantages over traditional hard drives, including higher
bandwidths or the rate at which large blocks of data can be read or
written, lower power consumption, and greater mechanical stability owing
to the lack of moving parts. For data-intensive applications, though,
the biggest advantage is much lower latency, or the delay between a
request for data and the delivery of the first byte.”
Now you know for sure that SSDs are the future!
