Intel Optane Persistent Memory Tops IO500 List

Intel announced today that its Optane persistent memory (PMem), in combination with Intel’s open-source distributed asynchronous object storage (DAOS) solution, has taken the no. 1 position on the Virtual Institute for I/O IO500 list for file system performance. Intel said DAOS, with 30 servers of Intel Optane PMem, came in ahead of systems on the Top500 supercomputing list.

Optane and DAOS displaces the previous no. 1 vendor, WekaIO, now listed at no. 2 using the WekaIO Matrix file system in the WekaIO on AWS system, followed by two more DAOS file system solutions — in the Frontera supercomputer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center and in the Presque system at Argonne National Laboratory, respectively.

Here’s a complete list of the IO500.

Intel said the results “validate the solution’s delivery as having the most performance of any distributed storage today. They also demonstrate how Intel is truly changing the storage paradigm by providing customers the persistence of disk storage with the fine-grained and low-latency data access of memory in its Intel Optane PMem product.”

The Optane PMem 200 series provides up to 4.5TB of memory per socket to manage data-intensive workloads, such as in-memory databases, dense virtualization, analytics and high-powered computing.

“The recent IO-500 results for DAOS demonstrate the continuing maturity of the software’s functionality enabled by a well-managed code development and testing process,” said Gordon McPheeters, HPC systems administration specialist at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility. “The collaborative development program will continue to deliver additional capabilities for DAOS in support of Argonne’s upcoming exascale system, Aurora.”

DAOS with Optane made debuted on the IO500 list at SC19 last November. This year, Intel customers Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) and Argonne National Lab also entered DAOS with Intel Optane PMem, which landed at No. 3 and No. 4 on the full list, respectively.

In the 10-node challenge, where systems are compared with 10 clients each, the three Optane DAOS solutions took the top three rankings (Intel, TACC and Argonne). “Both lists are important for the assessment of file system efficiency, client performance and scalability on mass scale installations,” Intel said in its announcement today.

“We are extremely grateful to our partners, software developers and larger ecosystem for helping us achieve the No. 1 ranking,” said Alper Ilkbahar, vice president of the Data Platforms Group and general manager of the Memory and Storage Products Group at Intel. “Only with the combination of DAOS and Intel persistent memory can such performance be reached today. We are very excited to continue to innovate with our partners and customers and keep pushing the limits of speed and performance.”