Cray Expands Sonexion HPC Storage Line With 1600 Model

Cray Inc. announced the latest addition to its line of scale-out Lustre storage solutions with the launch of its Cray Sonexion 1600 system.

The next generation of the company’s integrated file system, the Sonexion 1600 system is fast, compact, high quality and built on open standards.

It scales from TBs to PBs. The storage system’s modular architecture enables incremental performance and capacity scalability, well-suited to a range of HPC applications and workloads – from technical computing to high-end HPC systems.

This new storage system is a part of the Blue Waters supercomputer at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. The Sonexion 1600 storage system at NCSA consists of more than 25PB of usable storage in 36 cabinets with more than 17,000 disks, and delivers more than 1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth performance to more than 25,000 compute nodes. It is also available and in production for non-Cray cluster-attached systems.

"Storage has become essential to scientific computing, and what Cray has done is design and build a storage system that is immense – I don’t know of any other system with the requirements for scalability that is being put together for such huge applications," said Bill Kramer, deputy project director for the Blue Waters Project at NCSA. "With the Sonexion 1600 storage system and its Cray Lustre environment, Cray has built a file system that is highly reliable, productive and very performant. NCSA also has recently demonstrated over 1.1TB/sec of I/O bandwidth with this file system for multiple real-world use cases, and we believe this to be the fastest Lustre file system ever built."

"Our Sonexion 1600 system exemplifies our focus and expertise in deploying parallel storage solutions for HPC and technical computing all the way from 100TBs to tens of petabytes," said Barry Bolding, Cray’s VP of storage and data management. "We are pleased with our storage accomplishments as part of the Blue Waters system, and we are excited to introduce a new addition to our line of Sonexion products that already have a proven track record from departmental to the highest levels of supercomputing."

Available, the Sonexion 1600 system is an integrated, scale-out Lustre storage system designed for a range of HPC workloads. The system features a compact design for maximum density, and can reduce the storage footprint by 50% for petascale systems. It system features an upgrade in speed by being able to scale large I/O and throughput from 5GB/s up to a 1TB/s 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.

A number of HPC centers have already signed contracts to purchase Sonexion 1600 systems, including the Swiss National Supercomputing Centre (CSCS) in Lugano, Switzerland; the Department of Energy’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center (NERSC) in Berkeley, California; and the Pawsey Centre in Perth, Australia, which is owned by CSIRO and operated by iVEC. The Cray Sonexion storage system delivered to NERSC is capable of scaling to more than 6PBs of usable storage and more than 140GB/s of sustained aggregate I/O performance.

In addition to the Sonexion 1600 storage solution, Cray will continue to offer the Sonexion 1300 system, which was introduced in November 2011. Complementing the Sonexion line of products is Cray’s Data Management Platform. The company offers pre-validated architectures, best practices, and solutions for DataDirect Networks, Inc.‘s and NetApp, Inc.‘s E-Series storage systems.