Lawrence Livermore Broke Previous Graph Size Record on SSD

Fusion-io, Inc.
announced that Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory broke its
previous graph size record set in the June 2011 Graph500 competition with a
single node server containing 12TB of ioMemory technology from Fusion-io.

The LLNL system, called Leviathan, is based on a
four-socket 40-core Intel Xeon 7500 processor, nine Fusion ioDrive Duos, and
one ioDrive. By storing the graph in Fusion-io’s direct-attached high
performance ioMemory technology, the LLNL algorithm could use a single computer
to process a graph with 68,719,000,000 nodes (known as "scale 36"
meaning 2^36 nodes) – four times the size previously attained.

The Fusion
ioDrives provided low latency access to graph nodes and edges, enabling an alternative for data intensive computing. In contrast, most other
Graph500 submissions rely on expensive supercomputers with many hundreds to
thousands of compute nodes.

"As a
multidisciplinary national security R&D laboratory that deploys some of the
world’s most powerful computing systems, we must continually push the state of
the art in such areas as data intensive computing, which is increasingly
important to our mission work," says Maya Gokhale of LLNL. "To advance the data-intensive computing
capabilities we need for applications in cyber security and informatics, we
work with industry leaders such as Fusion-io. The innovative use of technology
has allowed us to solve large data intensive problems on commodity hardware."

The Fusion-io solution also provides
scalability, as LLNL demonstrated a second scale 36 result with Fusion
ioMemory, using 64 compute nodes, each integrated with two Fusion ioDrive Duos
on the Hyperion Data Intensive Testbed. The Hyperion Data Intensive Testbed is
a LLNL and Fusion-io collaboration to explore data-intensive computing systems
that leverage low latency flash memory. The single node Leviathan system
achieved 52.796 million traversed edges per second (TEPS), the Graph500 speed
metric, while the Hyperion DIT attained more than an order of magnitude higher
TEPS.

"Lawrence Livermore’s achievement
is significant not only for its impressive results, but also due to the impact
this extremely efficient system could have on the computing industry as a
whole," said Neil Carson , Fusion-io Chief Technology Officer. "When you decouple performance from scale,
customers no longer have to pay twice for performance in their server and their
SAN. Given the energy and costs associated with building out and running a
supercomputer, LLNL’s benchmarks point to vast savings while achieving the top
tier performance required by leading HPC research. LLNL was one of the first to
adopt Fusion-io technology, and we congratulate their visionary team for
beating their previous results with Fusion ioMemory and their powerful
algorithm on a single node."

Powered by Fusion’s Virtual Storage Layer (VSL) software,
Fusion ioMemory is integrated within the server to offer applications and
databases low latencies to deliver advanced performance and scalability, as
well as enterprise reliability.

Fusion ioMemory was integrated into a number
of HPC solutions at Supercomputing 2011 (SC 2011) in Seattle taking place November 14 – 17.