BSC takes one of top spots in the IO500 10-Node Challenge

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The Storage Systems for Extreme Computing team from BSC has taken the number 4 spot in the IO500 10-Node Challenge with GekkoFS. This ephemeral file system was developed in partnership with Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (JGU) as part of the Horizon 2020 NEXTGenIO project and Germany’s SPPEXA program.

The IO500 “10-Node Challenge” list is a global ranking that uses multiple concurrent processes running in 10 compute nodes to benchmark the I/O performance of a HPC storage system in terms or bandwidth and throughput. GekkoFS’ score of 125 ranks it fourth in IO500’s 10-Node Challenge List and ninth in IO500’s Full List, with an average 21.41 GiB/s of bandwidth and an average of 728,680 operations per second.

The IO500 benchmark was run on the 34 compute nodes of the NEXTGenIO prototype cluster. NEXTGenIO, an R&D project involving EPCC, Intel, Fujitsu, Arm, ECMWF, TUD, Arctur and BSC which has been granted €8 million in funding by the European Commission, has developed a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster based on Intel OptaneTM DC persistent memory technology. Each of the prototype’s 34 nodes is equipped with two second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 3TB of Intel Optane DC persistent memory, thus providing approximately 102TB of persistent I/O capacity to HPC applications.

Within the project, BSC collaborated with JGU in the design and development of GekkoFS, a file system capable of aggregating the local I/O capacity and performance of each compute node to produce a high- performance storage space that can be accessed in a distributed manner. This storage space allows HPC applications and simulations to run in isolation from each other with regards to I/O, which reduces interferences and improves performance.

GekkoFS is available via the NEXTGenIO GitHub.

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