Intel SSD 710 Series to Deliver 35 Million IOPS

Intel just launched the enterprise-ready SSD 710 Series and already they’re about to post some impressive results. The 710 SSDs will be featured in the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer, named Gordon by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, which will be able to turn 35 million IOPS. How many Intel 710 SSDs does it take to get to 35 million IOPS you might ask? According to Gordon’s team the answer is “massive amounts,” but in more practical terms that means 300TB. Perhaps Flash Gordon would be a more appropriate name.

Intel just launched the enterprise-ready SSD 710 Series and already they’re about to post some impressive results. The 710 SSDs will be featured in the Appro Xtreme-X Supercomputer, named Gordon by the San Diego Supercomputer Center (SDSC) at the University of California, San Diego, which will be able to turn 35 million IOPS. How many Intel 710 SSDs does it take to get to 35 million IOPS you might ask? According to Gordon’s team the answer is “massive amounts,” but in more practical terms that means 300TB. Perhaps Flash Gordon would be a more appropriate name.

With all this power, just what does SDSC have in mind for Gordon? Data-intensive applications in fields like genomics, graph problems, geophysics, and data mining to start. This translates into research around personalized medicine, earthquake modeling and planetary climate simulations.

More on the components and capabilities of Gordon:

Gordon will be composed of a 1,024 node supercomputer cluster architecture based on the future Intel Xeon processor E5 Family. The Intel processor uses Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) to achieve 8 floating point operations/clock cycles providing twice the performance on numerically intensive applications than current processors of the same core count and frequency. The system will be capable of performing in excess of 200 TFlops with a total of 64 terabytes (TB) of memory and 300TB of high performance Intel SSDs served via 64 I/O nodes connected by a dual rail, QDR InfiniBand, 3D torus network. Each of these I/O nodes is capable of more than 560K IOPS, or 35M IOPS for the full system; large memory super nodes that provide up to 2 TB of cache-coherent memory via a high performance software aggregation layer; and access to a 4 petabytes (PB ) Lustre-based file system capable of sustained rates of 100GB/s. Gordon will be factory integrated by Appro’s turn-key System Delivery Integration Services including on-site professional services installation, training and 24/7 maintenance support.

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