This week Cray announced the Sonexion 1600 storage system. As the storage technology that powers the Blue Waters supercomputer, the Cray Sonexion 1600 system scales from terabytes to petabytes with a modular architecture that enables incremental performance and capacity scalability for HPC workloads.
The Sonexion 1600 storage system at NCSA consists of more than 25 petabytes of usable storage in 36 cabinets with more than 17,000 disks, and delivers more than 1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth performance to more than 25,000 compute nodes.
Storage has become essential to scientific computing, and what Cray has done is design and build a storage system that is immense. I don’t know of any other system with the requirements for scalability that is being put together for such huge applications,” said Bill Kramer, deputy project director for the Blue Waters Project at NCSA. “With the Sonexion 1600 storage system and its Cray Lustre environment, Cray has built a file system that is highly reliable, productive and very performant. NCSA also has recently demonstrated over 1.1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth with this file system for multiple real-world use cases, and we believe this to be the fastest Lustre file system ever built.”
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