Friday June 19, 2009 SSDs in HPC: Reducing the I/O Bottleneck
This new Sun BluePrints article focuses on a comparison between traditional hard disk drives (HDDs) and the newer solid state drive (SSD) technology in high-performance computing (HPC) applications. SSD devices can help correct the imbalance between processor and storage speed while also reducing energy usage and environmental impact. This comparison was performed using two approaches:
Application-based benchmarking was performed using the ABAQUS, NASTRAN, and ANSYS finite-element analysis (FEA) applications, in order to evaluate the effect of SSD technology in realistic HPC applications. These applications are commonly used to benchmark HPC systems. Benchmark testing of storage performance using the Lustre™ parallel file system and the popular IOZone benchmark application was performed, in order to evaluate large sequential I/O operations typical for the Lustre file system employed as a compute cluster data cache. Full Story
Posted by Rich Brueckner [HPC Article of the Day] ( June 19, 2009 05:00 AM ) Permalink | Comments [0]
