14 DAY TRIAL // After taking by storm the consumer space, SSDs have started making their way into the high performance computing sector as well, SMART Modular just announcing their XceedIOPS solid state drives will be used in the planned IBM POWER7 HPC.
Announced during the Supercomputing 2010 conference, IBM high-performance computer will make use of these drives in order to provide substantially higher levels of performance (compared to that of HDDs), while also delivering the increased reliability and integrity needed, since XceedIOPS SSDs promise to deliver a five-year minimum operational life.
Furthermore, this lifespan is guaranteed even in workload-intensive environments, the XceedIOPS SSDs using a extensive error correction and detection features in addition to enterprise grade Multi Level Cell (E-MLC) NAND flash cells, these being a lot better suited for HPC use than their MLC counterparts.
As far as performances go, the XceedIOPS series can reach up to 250/230MB/s read and write sequential speeds, the IOPS count coming in at 26K and 20K for random reads and writes, all these while maintaining a 4.5W maximum power draw.
“Products like the IBM POWER7 supercomputer are defining leading-edge computing and serve as an excellent example of how the combination of performance, price, reliability, and endurance in the XceedIOPS SAS SSD enables the development of an entirely new class of application platforms," stated John Scaramuzzo, SMART's Senior Vice President and General Manager, Storage Business Unit.
"The selection criteria for SSDs has moved beyond HDD replacement, as innovative designers such as those at IBM use the qualities of enterprise-grade SSDs to significantly enhance their products’ performance, data integrity, and reliability."
Unfortunately, no further details are known about when will the very first IBM POWER7 high performance computers to use SMART Modular's SSDs will become available in the market, or for just how much these will retail.