GekkoFS makes top 10 in the IO500’s “10-Node Challenge” at SC’20

The GekkoFS file system jointly developed by the Storage Systems for Extreme Computing team from the Barcelona Supercomputing (BSC) and the Efficient Computing and Storage team from Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz (JGU) has taken the number 7 spot in the IO500’s ‘10-Node Challenge’.

NEXTGenIO prototype at EPCC datacenter

GekkoFS is an ephemeral file system capable of aggregating the local I/O capacity and performance of an HPC cluster compute nodes to create an ephemeral high-performance storage space that can be accessed by an application in a distributed manner. This storage space allows HPC applications and simulations to run in isolation from each other with regards to I/O, which reduces interferences and improves performance.

The IO500’s ‘10-Node Challenge’ list is a global ranking that executes multiple concurrent processes in 10 compute nodes to benchmark the I/O performance of a HPC storage system. In this edition, GekkoFS improved its previous score of 152 to 239, ranking it 7th in IO500’s 10-Node Challenge List and 25th in IO500’s Full List out of 153 entries.

GekkoFS’ IO500 benchmark was run on the 31 compute nodes of the NEXTGenIO prototype cluster. NEXTGenIO, was an EC-sponsored R&D project involving EPCC, Intel, Fujitsu, Arm, ECMWF, TUD, Arctur, and BSC which was granted €8 million in funding by the European Commission to prototype an I/O-specialized HPC cluster based on Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory technology. Each of the prototype’s 34 compute nodes is equipped with two second-generation Intel® Xeon® Scalable processors and 3TB of Intel® Optane™ DC persistent memory, thus providing approximately 102TB of persistent I/O capacity to HPC applications.

GekkoFS is being developed in partnership with JGU as part of the Horizon 2020 NEXTGenIO project and Germany’s SPPEXA programme.