Sistemas Informáticos Europeos, launches its new SIE Ladón equipment, mainly based on Intel brand SSD disks.
SSDs are a significant improvement in HPC nodes, mainly for 4 reasons:
- The main storage of the cluster is located on the server, with various solutions. The node disks are intended for booting, but mostly for scratch functions, which need to be performed when processing calculations. The improvement in reliability of SSD disks, as well as in performance, is much higher than that of conventional disks. In this way, the performance of the applications is greatly improved, as well as technical service interventions are reduced, since they are disks that do not have moving parts.
- SSD drives, based on memory, have hardly any consumption. At idle, a conventional disk can be around 10-15 W, while SSD disks are below 0,2 W and their consumption at rest is negligible. Therefore, in a multi-node cluster, the savings in electricity consumption are more than important and allow the cooling required for the HPC system to be less.
- Sie Ladón bases its nodes mainly on double twin solutions. In them, a node occupies ½ U. This supposes a forced wind tunnel, for proper cooling. Conventional discs heat up and therefore reduce the temperature gradient from the air intake in front of the node to its exhaust behind. The greater the temperature gradient, the better the cooling of the node. Therefore, the SSD disks do not heat up, they allow to improve the performance of the processors, which are then in the wind tunnel
- SSD drives, being based on flash memory technology, do not have defragmentation, so they are ideal for recording blocks of information that are continually being erased and rewritten. In addition, since Linux kernel 2.6 and following, the processor knows that it has an SSD disk and before sending the data, it tells the disk to prepare the space to host it. This is the reason why SSD drives have such a similar read/write speed, compared to conventional drives, where writing is highly penalized.
With the new Intel SSD DC S3510 and S3610 series, we break the barrier for competitively priced, high-capacity SSDs greater than 1TB. We incorporate disks of up to 1,2 TB and 1,6 TB, which mainly allows:
- Storage solutions with cabinets with 24 hard drives in 2U and more than 38 TB of gross capacity, with high speed access with 10GbaseT, 10G SFP+ and Infiniband connectivity of up to 100 Gb/s and a high value for money
- SSD-based high-speed boot virtualization solutions
- Bigdata solutions based on Hadoop, with performance 10 times higher than conventional disks
Likewise, we offer PCI Express 3.0 x8 disks of up to 4 TB (from the P3608 series) and NVE disks focused on high performance for large databases and Bigdata and data mining solutions.