Cray has announced the next generation of its integrated file system, the Cray Sonexion 1600. With a modular architecture that enables incremental performance and capacity scalability, the Sonexion 1600 is a fully integrated, scale-out Lustre storage system designed for a broad range of HPC workloads.
The system has a compact design for maximum density and can reduce the storage footprint by 50 per cent for petascale systems. It features a significant upgrade in speed by being able to scale large I/O and throughput from 5GB/sec up to a 1TB/sec in a single file system. With 4TB drives, the Sonexion 1600 also features an increase in Scalable Storage Unit (SSU) capacity with up to 240TB per SSU exceeding 1.4PBs per rack.
The new storage system is a key part of the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The Sonexion 1600 at NCSA consists of more than 25 petabytes of usable storage in 36 cabinets with more than 17,000 disks. It delivers more than 1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth performance to more than 25,000 compute nodes. The Cray Sonexion 1600 system is also available and in production for non-Cray cluster-attached systems.
