Nyriad to Accelerate Persistent Memory and GPUs for Storage

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Today Netlist, Nyriad, and HPC Systems announced their joint collaboration to deliver superior throughput, IOPs and resilience for high performance Lustre storage solutions for large and small files targeted at large-scale cluster computing.

This collaboration is one of the exciting revolutions in high performance computing where larger scale solutions result in a leap in efficiency,” said Teppei Ono, President of HPC Systems. “With Nyriad’s NSULATE technology, we get higher performance and resilience the more drives we add to a node. At larger storage scales with higher throughput, we can dispense with RAID controllers and use NVDIMM’s from Netlist to achieve millions of IOPs for large and small file transactions.”

HPC Systems is a leading expert in configuring Lustre solutions for scientific work-loads. In collaboration with Netlist and Nyriad, they bring to market next generation solutions that achieve superior performance and resilience at a lower cost than previous solutions based on RAID controllers. Netlist’s NVvault, non-volatile NVDIMM combined with Nyriad’s GPU-accelerated storage enables larger, more parallel Lustre OSD nodes to achieve higher throughput and higher IOPs with scale.

The CPU and RAID controller have become major obstacles to efficiently scaling parallel storage,” said Mario Martinez, Netlist Senior Director of Marketing. “With the team at HPC Systems and Nyriad, we introduce a new architecture based on our NVvault NVDIMM to bypass these obstacles altogether and deliver an innovative and superior performing solution.”

Nyriad Chief Technology Officer Alex St. John stated, “Netlist’s NVvault combined with using the GPU for storage processing gives us the maximum possible IOPs and a solution for overcoming the performance challenges introduced by the Meltdown and Spectre patches to the operating system. Through the utilization of NVDIMMs to transfer data directly to the GPU for storage-processing, the Linux kernel obstacles are bypassed and we can deliver enhanced performance and resilience.”

Netlist’s NVvault DDR4 is an NVDIMM-N that provides data acceleration and protection in a JEDEC standard DDR4 interface. It is designed to be integrated into industry standard server or storage solutions. NVvault is a persistent memory technology that has been widely adopted by industry standard servers and storage systems. By combining the high performance of DDR4 DRAM with the non-volatility of NAND Flash, NVvault improves the performance and data preservation found in storage virtualization, RAID, cache protection, and data logging applications requiring high-throughput.

Nyriad’s NSULATE solves these problems by replacing RAID controllers with GPUs for all Linux storage applications. This enables the GPUs to perform double duty as both I/O controllers and compute accelerators in the same integrated solution. The combination of Netlist NV Memory with NSULATE produces the best of both worlds, with low-latency IOPS achievable by any storage solution combined with maximum data resilience, security, throughput and efficiency in the same architecture.

Nyriad is a New Zealand-based exascale computing company specializing in advanced data storage solutions for big data and high-performance computing. Born out of its consulting work on the Square Kilometre Array Project, the company was forced to rethink the relationship between storage, processing and bandwidth to achieve a breakthrough in system stability and performance capable of processing and storing over 160Tb/s of radio antennae data in real-time, within a power budget impossible with any modern IT solutions.

In this video, Nyriad describes their company’s first commercial product, Nsulate, a GPU-accelerated storage solution that enables increased storage resilience while reducing the storage power requirements by over 50 percent.

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