News

A highlight of the recent ISC High Performance 2024 (ISC’24) conference was the unveiling of the latest IO500 list, which ranks computer systems based on storage performance through rigorous benchmark tests. The Lise system, operated by NHR@ZIB and built with Cornelis Networks’ Omni-Path high-performance networking technology, secured third place on the ten-node production list. Leveraging Cornelis Omni-Path, Lise’s DAOS storage system achieved a remarkable benchmark of 65 GBytes of bandwidth and 1.6 million I/O operations per second, resulting in twice the score of the 4th place system. This outstanding achievement, accomplished with ten client nodes and 960 client processes, also earned the Lise supercomputer fifth place on the overall IO500 production list.

“We are pleased to see Omni-Path enable award-winning storage performance as evidenced by the Lise system’s impressive entry in the IO500 list,” said Paul Stasurak, storage program manager at Cornelis Networks. “We are committed to continued innovation to push the boundaries of fabric performance in AI and HPC systems, enabling groundbreaking research and discoveries, and look forward to continued collaboration with the NHR@ZIB and DAOS teams.”

Michael Hennecke, Principal Engineer at Intel who supported ZIB’s benchmarking efforts, commented, “This performance is especially remarkable since the Lise supercomputer has already been in operation for several years, and the ranking was achieved with just ten 2nd Generation Xeon clients and a single Omni-Path 100Gbps link on each client. The Lise performance compares well with the DAOS results at ANL and LRZ (which use multiple 200Gbps links), and we’re excited that DAOS can now be used to accelerate I/O intensive applications on Lise.”

Thomas Steinke, who leads the NHR@ZIB team, added, “We are happy to see such promising performance numbers for our DAOS installation. The results with small-scale and TCP/IP over OPA networking suggest even better results are possible with a native networking solution and greater scale. For both aspects, we are working with our partners to further improve the service offered by DAOS.”

DAOS (Distributed Asynchronous Object Storage) is an open-source software-based storage system that operates completely in user space. It efficiently uses remote direct memory access (RDMA) features in modern HPC networks, NVMe devices, and persistent memory technologies.

In addition to Lise’s IO500 ranking, three other supercomputers using Cornelis Network’s Omni-Path were recognized in this year’s TOP500 list. Learn more here.