Lenovo Powers French Space Agency CNES Data Center for WW IO500 Start World Ranking

A newly upgraded data center at the French Space Agency CNES took 15th place in the world ranking in the list unveiled this month.

IO500 is an international benchmark standard managed by the Virtual Institute for I/O that measures bandwidth and IO/s using typical workloads observed on real systems.

“We are delighted with this success achieved by our teams,” said Frédéric Pradeilles, CNES’s director of digital technologies and operations. “Besides the ranking, we are glad to be able to offer a better service to our partners and users. In particular, we are boosting our ability to develop AI techniques and build them into space systems and mine the data they acquire.“

This year, 100 Lenovo SD530 nodes with 4,000 cores have been added to the data processing centre, taking the total to 12,288 cores. The 8,288 existing cores are spread across 276 Lenovo NX360 M5 servers and 104 Dell C6220 servers. Special attention has been paid to GPU capacity, with 20 NVIDIA Tesla V100 GPU cards and 8 NVIDIA Tesla T4 GPU cards added to the four existing accelerators, used primarily to support the agency’s growing AI needs.

Storage volume has been increased by 2.3PB and above all the storage architecture has been optimized with metadata stored on NVMe hardware, a 300TB SSD disk positioned as a burst buffer and dedicated I/O servers. There is now 100GB/s of theoretical bandwidth and several hundred thousand files can be created in one second. Total available volume is now 8.2PB.

CNES’s Data Processing Centre moved to its current location in the Galois building at the Toulouse Space Centre in 1994, since when it has undergone significant upgrades.

Its computing resources were previously used chiefly to model complex physical phenomena, for example in the design of engines and other elements of launchers. Nowadays, while modeling is still an important part of what it does, the platform is used mainly for satellite mission simulations, to process data from sensors and to exploit them for scientific purposes.