PaaS & Cloud

Software-defined storage

Media & Entertainment

HPC

Demand more from your SMB file storage in HPC applications

While high-performance computing (HPC) solutions have been predominantly applied to traditional research and engineering use cases, the scope of HPC applications is ever-growing. Whenever large-scale data processing, complex simulations, and intensive computational tasks are required, HPC is applicable. Most notably, there’s been significant leaps in HPC applications across a multitude of industries: energy, oil and resource exploration, financial services, manufacturing, aerospace and defense, pharmaceutical and healthcare, weather and climate forecasting, and media and entertainment.

The primary requirement for any HPC solution, regardless of the application is to deliver high performance. The HPC solution should handle large-scale data processing and computational workloads efficiently, and take advantage of all available network bandwidth to connect your real-time data or storage to compute nodes. Scalability is also a critical requirement, helping the system account for ever-growing data input and to get even more out of the data than imagined at design. Reliability and fault tolerance may also be major influencing factors depending on the application – the data must always be available as HPC solutions often run time-sensitive workloads. Lastly, encryption may also be paramount in an HPC solution, especially when sensitive data is transferred from the source and processed.

The SMB protocol enables essential network access, sharing, and management of files in HPC solutions. If these critical file operations are handled by a sub-optimal SMB implementation, the performance, scalability, reliability, availability, and security of the HPC system may be hindered or compromised.

See how Fusion File Share by Tuxera SMB server solution transformed an HPC imaging application in a medical research institute

Unleash the full potential of your HPC system with Fusion File Share SMB

Ensure the performance, scalability, reliability, and security of your HPC applications with Fusion File Share by Tuxera. With its state-of-the-art threaded architecture, our SMB implementation is designed for performance, which can be adapted toward any specific use case. Advanced SMB features such as RDMA and multichannel guarantee the performance of your HPC environment enabling faster computation and analysis processes. These features combined push the performance bottlenecks out of your data access layer, meaning your network bandwidth is the only limit.

What’s more, Fusion File Share’s scale-out awareness delivers seamless expansion of compute nodes and storage resources, allowing you to keep the pace with the growing demands of your HPC system. 

Small file performance comparison

With Fusion’s superior fail-over capability providing continuous availability, it preserves data integrity even in the face of concurrent access or system failures – ensuring uninterrupted operations. And with robust security features, including advanced authentication and encryption, Fusion File Share protects sensitive data from unauthorized access or breaches. As part of your data-intensive HPC environment, Fusion File Share enables efficient and secure data processing, analysis, and simulation – facilitating your novel discoveries, breakthroughs, and advancements.

Technical features relevant to HPC file access

  • RDMA (SMB-Direct)
  • Multichannel support
  • Threaded data processing
  • Scale-out awareness
  • Fail-over
  • Encryption
  • Active Directory support
  • Low CPU use and network overhead
  • Resources