Xinnor did it again!
In August, at Flash Memory Summit, Xinnor, an innovative Israeli software company specializing in data storage solutions, demonstrated world record performance with its xiRAID and 12 KIOXIA CM7-R Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe read-intensive SSD.
This time, KIOXIA provided for testing 24 units CM7-V Series PCIe 5.0 NVMe mixed-use SSD. Each drive is rated 14GB/s sequential read and 6.75GB/ sequential write, with random read being rated at 2.7M IOPS and random write over 600K IOPS. These drives are ideal for many applications, including HPC and AI.
When deploying several of these drives in a system, assuring proper performance scalability and data integrity becomes paramount.
Xinnor performed the test on a Supermicro server with 2 AMD Genoa CPU with 64 Core each. To avoid intra Numa nodes performance bottlenecks, Xinnor created 2 xiRAID groups with RAID level 5 over 12 drives, each group connected to a single NUMA node. This configuration provides best performance and at the same time, data protection in case of drive failure for each RAID group.
Traditionally, HPC installations have been accessing data sequentially. The emergence of AI workload is creating more challenges to the underlying storage as the access is a mix of random and sequential patterns.
As shown in this table, the results achieved by xiRAID are impressive in every workload*.
| Measured single drive performance | 2x RAID5 theoretical performance | xiRAID 2xRAID5 performance | Efficiency | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 4K Random Read (Millions of IOPS) | 2.7 | 64.8 | 65 | 100% |
| 4K Random Write (Millions of IOPS) | 0.7 | 8.0 | 8 | 100% |
| Full Stripe Sequential read (GB/s) | 14 | 336 | 310.3 | 92% |
| Full Stripe Sequential write (GB/s) | 6.75 | 149 | 144.5 | 97% |
Here is a video that shows dashboards with system performance for Random/Sequential Writes/Reads: https://drive.google.com/file/d/
Alternative software and GPU-assisted RAID implementations trade performance with CPU load. This is not the case for xiRAID: in sequential workloads, it’s remarkable that these record performances were achieved by using only 16 out of the 128 available cores for running both the data flow as well as xiRAID calculations. In random operations, xiRAID calculations only required 3-9% of half of the cores. Such low CPU utilization is critical in compute intensive application as all the other available cores can be used for what they are meant for: running the HPC/AI models.
Xinnor also tested what happens in degraded mode. Degraded mode in RAID level 5 is when one drive is taken out of the RAID group. Indeed, being able to keep operating without any data loss and maintain good performance in degraded mode is the main reason why RAID is required. When emulating degraded mode, the performance remained extraordinarily high, with Random Read and Write respectively exceeding 34M and 6M IOPS. This is equivalent to 52% and 75% of the performance in normal operation. In sequential workload, Xinnor measured performance above 70% of normal operations. These percentages approach the theoretical maximum, demonstrating once again the superiority of xiRAID architecture.
In addition to RAID level 5, Xinnor also tested the same system by creating 2 groups of RAID level 6 (2x 10 drives for data and 2 drives for parity). This configuration can withstand the failure of 2 drives for each RAID group.
In read workload, the performance in RAID level 6 were almost the same as the one measured in RAID level 5: 64M IOPS in Random and 310GB/s in Sequential. In write operation, because of the need to calculate and write one additional parity, the performance was slightly lower (5.2M IOPS in Random and 128GB/s in Sequential) but still above anything demonstrated so far by any alternative RAID solution.
Xinnor will showcase the results of this test at SC23 in Denver. Please stop by booth 389 to see the demo and speak with Xinnor’s experts.
* Testing System configuration:
xiRAID configuration: 2x RAID level 5; Server: 1x Supermicro AS-2125HS-TNR, CPUs: 2x AMD EPYC 9534 64-Core Processor @ 2450 MHz, Memory: 24x Micron 32 GB DIMMS @ 4800 MT/s
Drives: 1x KIOXIA CD7 (boot drive), 24x KIOXIA CM7 3.2 TB KCMYXVUG3T20 drives, OS: Ubuntu 22.04.3 LTS, Kernel: 5.15.0-87-generic
