Case Study: NASA Ames Research Center achieves petabyte-scale low-latency shared storage with Excelero NVMesh

Pooling NVMe enables new Science use cases at NASA

The NASA Ames Research Center, home to the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility, sought to overcome the challenge of data locality in its high-performance computing environment. Their hyperwall visualization system for massive datasets was hindered by the latency and programming complexity of managing isolated NVMe flash drives across many compute nodes. They engaged with Excelero to find a way to leverage the performance of local flash in a distributed fashion without the burden of managing data placement.

Excelero implemented its NVMesh software to unify the center's 128 disparate NVMe drives into a single, high-performance 256TB storage pool. This solution provided every compute node with low-latency, local-speed access to the entire dataset, eliminating concerns about data locality. The result was a dramatically improved interactive experience on the hyperwall, with measured performance exceeding 30 million random read IOPS and 140 GB/s of bandwidth, allowing researchers to interact with visual simulations in a more natural and lag-free manner.

Nasa Ames Research Center