GekkoFS ranked #4 in the IO500’s “10-Node Challenge” at SC19
The GekkoFS file system jointly developed by the ZDV and the Barcelona Supercomputing Center (BSC) has been ranked No. 4 in the IO500’s “10-Node Challenge”. GekkoFS is a file system capable of aggregating the local I/O capacity and performance of each compute node in a HPC cluster to produce a high-performance storage space that can be accessed in a distributed manner. This storage space allows HPC applications and simulations to run in isolation from each other with regards to I/O, which reduces interferences and improves performance.
The development has been funded in the context of the SPPEXA programme and the Europeans Horizon 2020’s NEXTGenIO project. The IO500’s “10-Node Challenge” list is a global ranking that uses multiple concurrent processes running in 10 compute nodes to benchmark the I/O performance of a HPC storage system in terms or bandwidth and throughput. GekkoFS’ score of 125 ranks it 4th in IO500’s 10-Node Challenge List and 9th in IO500’s full list.
The IO500 benchmark was run on the 34 compute nodes of the NEXTGenIO prototype cluster. Each of the prototype’s 34 nodes is equipped with two 2nd generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 3 TBytes of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, thus providing approximately 102 TBytes of persistent I/O capacity to HPC applications.