Supercomputers go to SSD?

The San Diego City Supercomputing Center has created a high-performance computer with SSD hard drives that can solve scientific problems faster than computers with familiar hard drives. SSD-HDD provides more data throughput, so the supercomputer analyzes data in order of magnitude faster than hard disk-based supercomputers. Such a machine can solve data retrieval problems ten times faster than even larger supercomputers that operate using “spinning disk” technology. The company intends to use the HPC-system Dash to develop new drugs and study the origin of the Earth.

According to the company, they are developing the first HPC system using flash memory technology, and the testing of the new product has already begun. The supercomputer consists of 68 Appro International GreenBlade servers equipped with 4-core Intel Xeon 5500 with a maximum performance of up to 5.2 teraflop. Each node of the supercomputer has 48GB of memory (the cumulative amount of memory in 16 segments is 768GB).

The machine uses Intel's solid-state SATA hard drives with four I / O nodes. They provide the remaining nodes of the machine with flash memory up to 1TB. The total capacity of servers in the company is not reported.
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via computerworld.com