GPU-accelerated Storage System goes “Beyond RAID”

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Today Nyriad and Advanced HPC announce their partnership for a new NVIDIA GPU-accelerated storage system that achieves data protection levels well beyond any RAID solution.

Nyriad and Advanced HPC have brought together a hardware and software reference implementation around a GPU to mitigate rebuild times, enable large-scale RAID systems to run at full speed while degraded, reduce failures, and increase overall reliability, said Christopher M. Sullivan, Assistant Director for Biocomputing at Oregon State University’s Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB). “We look forward to their continued technology support and innovative approach that keeps CGRB at the forefront of computational research groups.”

Advanced HPC’s Orion system is based on the TYAN Thunder SX FA100, which supports 100 HDDs in a 4U rack space without the need for an external host unit. Orion is a first of its kind system that combines Nyriad’s NSULATE software with an NVIDIA Tesla P4 and 64GB of Netlist NVDIMMs.

Orion will be on display in Advanced HPC’s booth #431 at the GPU Technology Conference this week in Silicon Valley. During GTC 2018, in-booth demonstrations of Orion will be presented by Alex St. John, Nyriad’s Chief Technology Officer, at 12 noon and 6 p.m. on Tuesday, March 27, and at the same times on Wednesday, March 28. St. John rose to international prominence as a co-creator of the Microsoft DirectX media platform in the 1990s, which gave rise to the modern generation of supercomputing GPUs and went on to become the OS for the XBox.

Orion is especially suitable for applications for high performance computing, big data and hyperscale storage, in verticals ranging from large enterprise to life sciences. To that end, the solution is being adopted by Oregon State University’s Center for Genome Research and Biocomputing (CGRB).

For many years the growth of disk capacity has far outpaced the growth of interface speeds, leading to extremely long rebuild times on large-scale RAID systems, said Sullivan. “The CGRB at Oregon State University has played a pioneering role in introducing new hardware and software technologies to solve the growing problems around big data.”

Advanced HPC President Toni Falcone said, “We’re eager to take our expertise with NVIDIA GPUs into the storage market, and we’re especially excited to be involved with Nyriad. NSULATE and the Orion server are a breakthrough in hyperscale storage and data-intensive HPC.”

Nyriad CEO Matthew Simmons added, “We are very excited to be working with Advanced HPC, TYAN, Netlist, and NVIDIA to create the world’s first GPU-accelerated storage appliance. I believe this introduction to the market of the first GPU-accelerated storage product heralds the end of the RAID hardware era and the beginning of the GPU era for storage-processing. Once people see how fast, versatile and resilient GPU storage is, it will be impossible to go back to static RAID hardware.”

About Nyriad

Nyriad is an exascale software company specialising in advanced data storage solutions for big data and high performance computing. Nyriad initially developed a GPU-accelerated storage technology for the Square Kilometre Array, the world’s largest computing project. The sheer scale of the problem led Nyriad to a breakthrough in computing density where parallel computing and distributed storage-processing become the same thing. Nyriad’s first product, NSULATE, is now available from selected distributors. Contact partnerships@nyriad.com if you are interested in being a distribution or marketing partner. For more information, visit nyriad.com.

About NSULATE

NSULATE is a GPU-accelerated, software-defined alternative to RAID that presents groups of physical storage devices as a Linux block device to the system. NSULATE uses the processing power of modern GPUs to perform erasure coding in real time at many times the resilience and speed of CPU erasure coding or RAID-based systems. NSULATE performs cryptographic checksums on every block of data to prove that every bit stored is perfectly recovered. The use of a GPU as a storage processor enables configuration of reliable arrays with many times greater parallelism and scale than traditional storage arrays.

About Advanced HPC

Founded in 2009, Advanced HPC is a leading provider of customized High Performance Computing (HPC) solutions specifically designed to meet the escalating data storage and compute demands of today’s enterprise. We understand the unique requirements of business leaders, IT professionals, scientists and researchers who are sparking innovation, driving discovery, and changing the world. Our HPC and storage platforms deliver the high-end performance they need at a price that they can afford.

Led by a veteran staff of engineering, sales, customer service and production experts, Advanced HPC’s proven team – having worked over 80 years in the technology industry – provides a pre- and post-sale experience second to none. Whether your organization is working to cure cancer or teaching the next generation of innovators, Advanced HPC is the partner that you need to successfully deploy the computing and storage systems that support your mission.

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