14 DAY TRIAL // Based on its ioMemory technology, Fusion-io developed a custom-designed PCI Express card called the ioDrive Octal card. What this product is capable of doing is simultaneously hold eight ioMemory Modules, becoming a card with the combined capacity and performance of eight ioDrives in one. In using this invention, the company was able to achieve the 1TB/s sustained bandwidth with just 220 ioDrive Octal cards, through I/O servers attached to Infinband and running the Lustre parallel file system.
This is a major improvement compared to the alternative for reaching such a bandwidth. With normal technology, 1TB/s would barely be achievable by using close to 55,440 disk drives, 396 SAN controllers, 792 I/O servers and 132 racks of equipment. Fussion-io's method uses less than 1/20th of the rack space required by such an aggregate.
“We were eager to take on the challenge of creating a device that meets the intense demands of high performance computing. With this architecture, IOPS are easy. We achieved over a hundred million IOPS, more than enough performance to meet our customer’s requirements. The real power in our architecture was the ability to also scale bandwidth. We look forward to productizing the ioDrive Octal in the future, and bringing the power of this solid-state storage technology from the world of HPC to the enterprise,” said Steve Wozniak, chief scientist at Fusion-io.
What is interesting is the fact that the ioDrive Octal card can fit into any PCI Express 2.0 x 16 double-wide slot, identical to those used by high-end graphics adapters, and is capable of fully utilizing the slot's resources. The aforementioned system comprised of 220 ioDrive Octal cards is, thus, capable of even scaling the bandwidth, creating a flexible, highly-performing and scalable HPC system.
An individual PCIe x16 2.0 double-wide PCI Express ioDrive Octal is able to reach 800,000 IOPS (4k packet size), and can provide a sustained bandwidth of 6GB/s on its own. It was these specifications that allowed the card's creator to yield an HPC with breakthrough-level capabilities at less that one twentieth of the rack space. The product has reportedly been handpicked by undisclosed government facilities.
“Innovative technology, like Fusion's ioMemory, will fundamentally change the way the industry architects high performance computing facilities in the future. Technologies like these will drive new and emerging HPC systems as they continue their exponential growth in performance. Only improvements in storage bandwidth at this order of magnitude can keep the floor space and power consumption requirements from becoming unmanageable and unsustainable,” said Mark Seager, manager of the platforms program for the advanced simulation and computing (ASCI) program at Lawrence Livermore.