DDN Customer Cineca Posts Dominating Bandwidth Score

DDN (DataDirect Networks Inc.) has achieved the highest bandwidth score for a production system on the IO500 benchmark in conjunction with customer CINECA on its Leonardo supercomputing system.

The Leonardo system, delivering AI and HPC computing power to tackle urgent societal challenges, won first place for highest bandwidth for systems running production workloads in the IO500 at ISC High Performance (ISC) in Hamburg, Germany, with a score of 807.12GB/s.

This achievement underscores DDN’s track record of delivering scalable and reliable storage solutions for the world’s most significant production AI and HPC systems. DDN’s parallel filesystem addresses the ever-increasing demand for performance-hungry computing environments that use GPUs to process enormous amounts of data from diverse sources like numerical models and high-resolution sensors.

“The Leonardo HPC delivers game-changing AI and HPC performance for the betterment of European research. This kind of power needs an extremely well-optimized storage environment to gain maximum efficiency,” said Mirko Cestari, HPC and cloud technology coordinator, CINECA. “We chose DDN because of its ability to accelerate all stages of the AI and HPC workloads lifecycle.“

The Leonardo system is equipped with DDN’s EXAScaler storage solution and a hybrid infrastructure consisting of a flash tier able to deliver over 1.4TB/s throughput and a capacity tier with 106PB of disk storage that provides an impressive aggregate bandwidth of over 600GB/s. Ranked as the 4th largest HPC in the world by the TOP500, the system supports data-intensive AI and HPC applications like AI, weather forecasting, bio-engineering, and material design.

“We are proud of our support for the goals of the Leonardo system and know that solutions for scalable production AI and HPC environments require more than just amazing performance,” says Tommaso Cecchi, senior director of sales for EMEA, DDN. “When systems this size run around-the-clock workloads with meaningful research and commercial outcomes, the supporting storage systems must also be efficient and reliable.“

The IO500 list is an essential benchmark for the efficiency of storage systems in AI and HPC supercomputing environments. The list is refreshed twice yearly during the International Conference for HPC, Network, Storage, and Analysis (SC) in the US and ISC in Europe. Of particular importance, the IO500 measures storage performance data bandwidth (GB/s) and read/write speed (IO/s) under a variety of tests to produce a result that is representative of typical workloads observed on systems used for production AI and HPC applications.

The Production List narrows the number of eligible systems to those that meet a stricter definition of production system. To qualify, these systems must be in daily use by end users with production applications over a long period, rather than systems deployed just for testing purposes, and must have additional reliability characteristics.

These results confirm the importance of reliability and efficiency in the architecture of scalable storage systems and empower DDN customer CINECA and its end users with great flexibility to address the most demanding I/O use cases and total system performance.