SIE has begun to integrate the Micron-Crucial SSD drives into their whole HPC solutions, specifically in the calculus nodes.
These SSD drives basically provide a great advantage at various levels:
– These drives are much more reliable than conventional HDD due to absence of moving parts, in addition of not being affected by vibrations, temperature or magnetic fields, frequently present in the cluster computing
– The average writing/reading speed, is on the order of 80,000-90,000 IOPS, which represents 10 times higher than a conventional HDD drive.
– Consumption is becoming a limiting factor in many operations. The conventional HDD drives are within a consumption range of about 10-20 W per disk, in front of less than 2 W of one SSD drive (and about 0 W when they are at idle). If we multiply by 20 or 30 nodes, very usual amount nowadays in small clusters, it is a significant savings.
– Less consumption represents less heat dissipation, which tends to be a common problem in most DPCs where the cluster is hosted, and also less warming in the tunnels of air that cool processors.
