HPC Systems, Netlist, and Nyriad: Joint Collaboration for Adoption of Persistent Memory and GPUs for Storage

Netlist, Inc., Nyriad Ltd., and HPC Systems, Inc. announced their joint collaboration to deliver superior throughput, IO/s and resilience for high performance Lustre storage solutions for large and small files targeted at large-scale cluster computing.

Netlist’s NVvault DDR4

HPC Systems is an expert in configuring Lustre solutions for scientific workloads. In collaboration with Netlist and Nyriad, they bring to market next generation solutions that achieve performance and resilience at a lower cost than previous solutions based on RAID controllers. Netlist’s NVvault, non-volatile NVDIMM combined with Nyriad’s GPU-accelerated storage enables larger, more parallel Lustre OSD nodes to achieve higher throughput and higher IO/s with scale.

Nyriad’s GPU-accelerated storage

Teppei Ono, president, HPC Systems, said: “This collaboration is one of the exciting revolutions in HPC where larger scale solutions result in a leap in efficiency. With Nyriad’s NSULATE technology, we get higher performance and resilience the more drives we add to a node. At larger storage scales with higher throughput, we can dispense with RAID controllers and use NVDIMM’s from Netlist to achieve millions of IO/s for large and small file transactions.“

Mario Martinez, senior director, marketing, Netlist, said: “The CPU and RAID controller have become major obstacles to efficiently scaling parallel storage. With the team at HPC Systems and Nyriad, we introduce a new architecture based on our NVvault NVDIMM to bypass these obstacles altogether and deliver an innovative and superior performing solution.“

Alex St. John, CTO, Nyriad, stated: “Netlist’s NVvault combined with using the GPU for storage processing gives us the maximum possible IO/s and a solution for overcoming the performance challenges introduced by the Meltdown and Spectre patches to the OS. Through the utilization of NVDIMMs to transfer data directly to the GPU for storage-processing, the Linux kernel obstacles are bypassed and we can deliver enhanced performance and rsilience.“

Netlist’s NVvault DDR4 is an NVDIMM-N that provides data acceleration and protection in a JEDEC standard DDR4 interface. It is designed to be integrated into industry standard server or storage solutions. NVvault is a persistent memory technology that has been widely adopted by industry standard servers and storage systems. By combining the performance of DDR4 DRAM with the non-volatility of NAND flash, NVvault improves the performance and data preservation found in storage virtualization, RAID, cache protection, and data logging applications requiring high-throughput.

Nyriad’s NSULATE solves these problems by replacing RAID controllers with GPUs for all Linux storage applications. This enables the GPUs to perform double duty as both I/O controllers and compute accelerators in the same integrated solution. The combination of Netlist NV Memory with NSULATE produces the best of both worlds, with low-latency IO/s achievable by any storage solution combined with maximum data resilience, security, throughput and efficiency in the same architecture.

HPC Systems is a system integrator of HPC solutions. Since its inception in 2006, the company has established itself as a technology and performance leader in Japanese small-to-mid-range HPC market. The company plans for further growth and developments in world class HPC cloud solutions, to support customers research and technological development worldwide.