Supercomputing company Cray is working with Oak Ridge National Laboratory to build the first exabyte storage solution.
The storage solution will be integrated into Cray’s upcoming $600 million Frontier supercomputer, which is expected to be the world's most powerful supercomputer when it is delivered in 2021.
The Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) Summit supercomputer is 250 petabytes, this latest storage solution will have more than four times that capacity.
The ClusterStor solution for ORNL will be comprised of over 40 cabinets of storage and provide more than one exabyte of total capacity across two tiers of storage to support random and streaming access of data.
Cray’s new solution hopes to address issues found when trying to balance traditional HPC functions as well as AI and machine learning applications. The company says it can tackle this problem by providing a blend of flash and hard disk storage to achieve a best of both worlds approach for both applications.
John Dinning, chief product officer at Cray, said: “We are excited to continue our partnership with ORNL to collaborate in developing a next generation storage solution that will deliver the capacity and throughput needed to support the dynamic new research that will be done on the Frontier exascale system for years to come.”
