Many of the HPC software we install in our Workstations and Servers need to write huge quantity of data to disk for optimal performance.
Programs like Gaussian or Relion are configured with a scratch space, where data are temporary written while processing, and before the final results are stored to a more conventional Hard Disk (standalone or in whatever RAID setup).
Values of 3.500 MB/s speed were standard in commodity hardware until a few months ago. Now PNY has surprised us with a 2TB model (M.2 2280 PCIe Gen4 x4 NMMe), for a price of about 350€ net.
Our SSD M.2 disk tests
We have just opened the box, installed SSD M.2 on our RYZEN Motherboard and run very basic standard gnome-disks utility on Centos 7.9 Linux.
We have tested with 3 different sample sizes: 10 Mb, 100 Mb and 1.000 Mb (1TB) file size. You can see the results here. Blue line is the READ speed and red line is WRITE speed.
Read / Write benchmark for 100 samples of 10 Mb
Average Read Rate: 5.2 GB/s
Average Write Rate: 3.6 GB/s
Read / Write benchmark for 100 samples of 100 Mb
Average Read Rate: 5.4 GB/s
Average Write Rate: 4.2 GB/s
Read / Write benchmark for 50 samples of 1.000 Mb (1GB)
Average Read Rate: 5.5 GB/s
Average Write Rate: 4.2 GB/s
The results showed that for big file sizes Read/Write speeds are really impressive and are closed to the specifications. This is very good news for people using scratch space as a part of the computational task. As a first approach this is an improvement over other M.2 3.500 MB/s read speed and could be really useful in some areas of GPU computing.
Next test? Yes, we’ll configure a RAID-0 system with this M.2 SSD disks and hope to see an increase in Read/Write speed.