Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

US Supercomputer Uses Flash Storage Drives

Posted by timothy on from the every-subsystem-counts dept.

angry tapir writes "The San Diego Supercomputer Center has built a high-performance computer with solid-state drives, which the center says could help solve science problems faster than systems with traditional hard drives. The flash drives will provide faster data throughput, which should help the supercomputer analyze data an 'order of magnitude faster' than hard drive-based supercomputers, according to Allan Snavely, associate director at SDSC. SDSC intends to use the HPC system — called Dash — to develop new cures for diseases and to understand the development of Earth."

3 of 72 comments (clear)

  1. Cost savings? by gabebear · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Hard drives are still the most cost-effective way of hanging on to data," Handy said. But for scientific research and financial services, the results are driven by speed, which makes SSDs makes worth the investment.

    Why is the super computer ever being turned off? Why not just add more RAM?

    SSD is cheaper than DDR ( ~$3/GB vs ~$8/GB ), but also ~100 times slower.

    1. Re:Cost savings? by SpaFF · · Score: 3, Insightful

      There are plenty of reasons why supercomputers have to be shut down....besides the fact that even with generators and UPSes facilities outages are still a fact of life. What if there is a kernel vulnerability (insert 50 million ksplice replies here...yeah yeah yeah)? What if firmware needs to be updated to fix a problem? You can't just depend on RAM for storage. HPC jobs use input files that are ten's of Gigabytes and produce output files that can be multi Terrabytes. The jobs can run for weeks at a time. In some cases it takes longer to transfer the data to another machine that it takes to generate/process the data. You can't just assume that the machine will stay up to protect that data.

      --
      -----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK----- Version: 3.12 GIT d? s: a-- C++++ UL++++ P++ L+++ E- W++ N o-- K- w--- O- M+ V PS+ P
  2. Re:Problems to solve with it: by bubbaD · · Score: 2, Insightful

    "But that's okay, I'm sure English is your first/only language." That seems to be a really lame attempt to insult native English users. There's no grammatical rules against "problems to solve with it." Even "To problem solve with it" is acceptable because the rule against split infinitives is considered obsolete and old fashioned. English has amazing flexibility. It is the perl of human languages!