Case Study: Exxact Corporation achieves faster HPC application benchmarking with Samsung SSDs

Exxact Corporation boosts GPU scaling with Samsung SSDs, reaching 384 ns/day on 8 GPUs

Exxact Corporation, a custom high-performance computing systems reseller, was benchmarking life-science applications on a system with multiple NVIDIA Tesla GPUs. They faced a challenge where application performance was not scaling linearly when moving from four to eight GPUs, with gains being incremental at best. Samsung SSDs were initially part of the test system, but a storage bottleneck was identified as the root cause.

The solution implemented by Samsung involved using multiple Samsung 860 EVO SSDs configured in a RAID-0 array to increase storage throughput and eliminate the bottleneck. This allowed the applications to scale much more effectively across the GPUs. The results showed a significant performance improvement; for instance, in one test with the GROMACS application, performance increased from 294 ns/day with four GPUs to 384 ns/day with eight, a 30% gain that was a substantial improvement over the previous scaling.

Exxact Corporation