WekaIO’s Matrix edges Intel DAOS as the fastest HPC file storage system

WekaIO has taken first place in the IO500 fastest HPC file system performance league table.

The full results were revealed this week at SC19 in Denver, with WekaIO edging Intel by scoring 938.95 vs 933.64. A Tianhe system running Lustre was well back in third place,, scoring 453.68.

The IO500 contains bandwidth, metadata and namespace searching components. It is run by the Virtual Institute for IO, a community of high performance IO enthusiasts. Among other things the group “tracks the deployment of large storage systems by hosting comprehensive information about high-performance storage systems.”

Intel’s DAOS (Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage) is open source scale-out software used in Intel’s exascale storage stack. It provides high bandwidth, low latency and high IOPS capability that is optimised for memory interface Optane DIMMs and NVMe-accessed Optane and NAND SSDs. 

DAOS servers keep metadata in Optane DIMM memory with bulk data stored on SSDs. There are no disks in a DAOS system.

Earlier this year WekaIO won a subset test, the IO500 10 Node Challenge. The node restriction was removed for this full test in which WekaIO ran in Amazon’s cloud with 345 client nodes. It did not use either Optane DIMMs or Optane SSDs.

The official IO500 list can be seen here. We have charted a summary:

Lustre is the most popular file system in the IO500. After the Chinese Tianhe-2E Lustre system, a Nvidia DDN Lustre system ranks fourth with 249.5. A BeeGFS system scoring 82.57 appears in ninth position after intervening WekaIO and Dell ThinkparQ systems.

Then it’s mostly Lustre, until IBM’s Spectrum Scale appears in fourteenth position, running on an Oracle Cloud system and achieving 47.55. Qumulo enters at number 23, with a 4.19 score.

Panasas, which this month claimed it had the best HPC parallel files system price/performance at any price point, is not present in this list.