KAISERSLAUTERN, Germany, Dec. 14, 2021 — ThinkParQ, the company behind the leading parallel file system BeeGFS, announced today its collaboration with global information and communications technology provider Huawei, to deliver Arm compatibility and support.
The Arm architecture has made its way from mobile processors to become a strong alternative to the traditional x86_64 architecture in the desktop and server computing market. With its high efficiency and large core counts, it is well suited for highly parallel workloads, making it an ideal choice for compute nodes but also for metadata and storage servers.
Initial performance results show that BeeGFS is able to fully utilize the hardware and to saturate the network on a setup with four server machines and six client machines, all on a 100Gb/s InfiniBand connection. For a maximum network bandwidth of 48GB/s (baseline of 12GB/s per storage server determined with qperf), we measured a read throughput of 47.7 GB/s for reads and 46.3GB/s for writes. That amounts to 99.3% and 96.4% of the maximum network throughput.
“We are delighted with our collaboration with Huawei, along with the results we are seeing from our engineering teams. As BeeGFS can saturate the hardware on the Arm system we are testing on, we will soon be able to deliver Arm compatibility and support on standard Linux kernels, enabling our customers to reduce their infrastructure complexity, whilst having the same performance and relieving the full bandwidth of their ecosystem” said Frank Herold, CEO, ThinkParQ.
As a platform for BeeGFS, Huawei’s Kunpeng server processor based on the Arm AArch64 architecture provides powerful multi-core processing, abundant I/O, PCIe 4.0/CCIX and hardware acceleration capabilities. Kunpeng is ideal for low-latency, high-bandwidth, and scalable storage solutions by employing BeeGFS.
“We are excited about the cooperation between ThinkParQ and Huawei to enable the use of the Arm AArch64 architecture with BeeGFS, which will flourish the Arm ecosystem and provide complementary solutions for Arm and BeeGFS users.” said Seaway Zhang, President of Kunpeng Computing Business, Huawei. “We recognize BeeGFS as one of the mainstream parallel cluster file systems that is special by the use of a distributed metadata architecture to eliminate architectural bottlenecks.”
About ThinkParQ GmbH
ThinkParQ GmbH strives to create and develop the fastest, most flexible, and most stable solutions for every performance-oriented environment. Established in 2014 as a spinoff from the Fraunhofer Center for High-Performance Computing, ThinkParQ drives the research and development of BeeGFS, and works closely with system integrators to create turn-key solutions. Visit http://www.thinkparq.com for further information.
About BeeGFS
BeeGFS is one of the leading parallel cluster file systems, developed with a strong focus on performance and designed for very easy installation and management. If I/O-intensive workloads are your problem, BeeGFS is the solution. For more information, visit www.beegfs.io.
Source: ThinkParQ