We already knew Liqid’s PCIe 4.0 SSD was fast – and now Liqid with Dell help has proved it.
Liqid makes composable systems using a PCIe fabric to link CPUs, GPUs, storage and networking server elements. It stuffed the company’s LQD4500 PCIe gen 4 add-in-card SSD inside a Dll PowerEdge R7515 rackmount server and produced a wicked fast box.
The R7515 is a single socket server in a 2U cab. It uses an AMD EPYC 7742 CPU with 64 cores and 128 PCIe gen 4 lanes, with a base 2.25GHz clock rate boostable to 3.4GHz, and up to 4TB of DRAM.
Dell’s R7515 also has a couple of PCIe gen 4 slots, one of which can be occupied by a Liqid LQD4500 add-in-card SSD. It has an NVMe interface and 30TB of capacity.
Liqid ran a R7515/LQD4500 system through its paces at its Colorado headquarters, with performance tests for random and sequential IO. The test system delivered 3.14 million random read IOPs (4K block size) and 961,663 random write IOPS. With 8K blocks, the benchmarks were 1.8 million random read and 479,889 random write IOPS.
Sequential bandwidth with 128K blocks was 24.471GB/sec reads and 10.052GB/sec writes. It was about the same with 256K blocks – 24.481GB/sec reads and 10.028GB/sec writes.
Socket to me
Liqid claims this R751 “powered by AMD and Liqid enables users to deploy server systems with the highest compute and storage performance on the market. This leading edge Gen4 PCIe platform is enabling next levels of performance not previously available from a single server let alone a single socket server.”
You can check out the case study for more details. PCIe gen 4 systems are going to reset everyone’s PCIe gen 3-based performance clock.
