March 05, 2013
SALT LAKE CITY, March 5 — Fusion-io today announced that it has achieved 9.608 million Input/Output Operations Per Second (IOPS) from a single 365 GB MLC Fusion ioDrive2. This performance breakthrough is made possible using Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) that integrate flash into host systems, allowing it to bypass normal bottlenecks in the operating system. These APIs are now being used by dozens of industry-leading software companies to update their applications to embrace the future of software defined datacenters.
The 9.6 million IOPS was accomplished with Auto-Commit Memory, which maintains the persistence of flash at performance levels in the nanoseconds, running on directFS. A nonvolatile memory optimized file system developed by Fusion-io, directFS eliminates duplicate work between the host file system and flash memory management software. The performance numbers were achieved utilizing single threaded, single queue depth 64 byte writes to the Auto-Commit Memory log.
"We believe software defined datacenters will be built on industry collaboration and open platforms, not proprietary closed systems," said David Flynn, Fusion-io chairman & chief executive officer. "The future of software defined datacenters will be based on an open, unified platform architected to leverage powerful CPUs, which need new programing primitives and APIs to deliver the flexibility and efficiency required to meet rapidly growing data demands."
Fusion-io is leading the development of new APIs including Auto-Commit Memory and directFS, which are part of the ioMemory Software Development Kit, the first SDK designed to integrate flash memory as a new computing tier in the datacenter. Other SDK APIs include Atomic Writes, which enables a processor to simultaneously write multiple independent storage sectors as a single storage transaction, helping to accelerate transactions in popular enterprise databases like MySQL by up to 75% compared to traditional storage architectures.
"With new primitives being introduced for nonvolatile memory technologies, we are at a crossroads in computing that will profoundly increase the value of IT to businesses," said David Vellante, chief research analyst, Wikibon. "The demand for data increases every day, and new and more effective ways to leverage all that data are absolutely essential for powerful applications and datacenter servers to be fully exploited. The future of data center infrastructure is being defined by software and software-led advances like the file system and APIs being developed by Fusion-io increase application performance by astounding levels. We believe these innovations will be instrumental in the ongoing evolution of IT architectures and data center designs."
Fusion-io is hosting a Technology Open House to share developments in the SDK APIs, including the 9.6 million IOPS demonstration, at its Salt Lake City headquarters as well as via webcast on Tuesday, March 26 at 11:00 a.m. MT.
About Fusion-io
Fusion-io delivers the world's data faster. Our Fusion ioMemory platform and software defined storage solutions accelerate virtualization, databases, cloud computing, big data and performance applications. From e-commerce retailers to the world's social media leaders and Fortune Global 500 companies, our customers are improving the performance and efficiency of their data centers with Fusion-io technology to accelerate the critical applications of the information economy.
-----
Source: Fusion-io
In quieter times, sounding the bell of funding big science with big systems tends to resonate further than when ears are already burning with sour economic and national security news. For exascale's future, however, the time could be ripe to instill some sense of urgency....
Read more...
In a recent solicitation, the NSF laid out needs for furthering its scientific and engineering infrastructure with new tools to go beyond top performance, Having already delivered systems like Stampede and Blue Waters, they're turning an eye to solving data-intensive challenges. We spoke with the agency's Irene Qualters and Barry Schneider about..
Read more...
Large-scale, worldwide scientific initiatives rely on some cloud-based system to both coordinate efforts and manage computational efforts at peak times that cannot be contained within the combined in-house HPC resources. Last week at Google I/O, Brookhaven National Lab’s Sergey Panitkin discussed the role of the Google Compute Engine in providing computational support to ATLAS, a detector of high-energy particles at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).
Read more...
May 23, 2013 |
The study of climate change is one of those scientific problems where it is almost essential to model the entire Earth to attain accurate results and make worthwhile predictions. In an attempt to make climate science more accessible to smaller research facilities, NASA introduced what they call ‘Climate in a Box,’ a system they note acts as a desktop supercomputer.
Read more...
May 22, 2013 |
At some point in the not-too-distant future, building powerful, miniature computing systems will be considered a hobby for high schoolers, just as robotics or even Lego-building are today. That could be made possible through recent advancements made with the Raspberry Pi computers.
Read more...
May 16, 2013 |
When it comes to cloud, long distances mean unacceptably high latencies. Researchers from the University of Bonn in Germany examined those latency issues of doing CFD modeling in the cloud by utilizing a common CFD and its utilization in HPC instance types including both CPU and GPU cores of Amazon EC2.
Read more...
May 15, 2013 |
Supercomputers at the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) have worked on important computational problems such as collapse of the atomic state, the optimization of chemical catalysts, and now modeling popping bubbles.
Read more...
05/10/2013 | Cleversafe, Cray, DDN, NetApp, & Panasas | From Wall Street to Hollywood, drug discovery to homeland security, companies and organizations of all sizes and stripes are coming face to face with the challenges – and opportunities – afforded by Big Data. Before anyone can utilize these extraordinary data repositories, however, they must first harness and manage their data stores, and do so utilizing technologies that underscore affordability, security, and scalability.
04/15/2013 | Bull | “50% of HPC users say their largest jobs scale to 120 cores or less.” How about yours? Are your codes ready to take advantage of today’s and tomorrow’s ultra-parallel HPC systems? Download this White Paper by Analysts Intersect360 Research to see what Bull and Intel’s Center for Excellence in Parallel Programming can do for your codes.
In this demonstration of SGI DMF ZeroWatt disk solution, Dr. Eng Lim Goh, SGI CTO, discusses a function of SGI DMF software to reduce costs and power consumption in an exascale (Big Data) storage datacenter.
The Cray CS300-AC cluster supercomputer offers energy efficient, air-cooled design based on modular, industry-standard platforms featuring the latest processor and network technologies and a wide range of datacenter cooling requirements.