Exploring Large All-Flash Storage System with Scientific Simulation

Solid state storage systems have been very effectively used in small devices; however, their effectiveness for large systems such as supercomputers is not yet proven. Recently, for the first time, a new supercomputer is being deployed with an all-flash storage as its main file system. In this work, we report our preliminary study of the I/O performance on this supercomputer named Perlmutter. We are able to achieve 1.4 TB/s with the default file configuration on the system. This default configuration outperforms dozens of other choices tested, though the current observed performance is still pretty far from the theoretical peak performance of 5 TB/s.