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"After further review, the Sugon ISC26 submission has been transferred from the Production List to the Research List, as it did not satisfy the criteria for the highest level of Reproducibility due to the lack of widely available architectural details and limited general availability of the file system," a statement by the IO500 Committee reads. "Accordingly, the previous #1 position on the Production and Production 10-Client lists (Argonne’s DAOS system) has been restored."
IO500 is essentially the storage counterpart to TOP500, but rather than ranking supercomputers by computational performance, it ranks HPC storage systems by their I/O performance in terms of overall bandwidth and I/O.
At ISC 2026, SCNet submitted two systems based on ParaStor storage software and ParaStor file system and F9000 all-flash storage systems. The larger SCNet AICS-A submission ran the IO500 benchmark from 500 client nodes with 64,000 client processors and achieved an IO500 score of 79,110.05, with 26,888.39 GiB/s of bandwidth and 232,754.76 kIOPS of metadata performance. The smaller AICS-B was a 10-client submission with 2,560 client processors. It scored 7,839.30, with 2,551.40 GiB/s and 24,086.69 kIOPS. Both submissions identify Sugon as the storage vendor and ParaStor as the file system.
The results substantially exceeded Argonne National Laboratory's Aurora running a custom storage subsystem featuring Intel's Optane Persistent Memory modules, SSDs, and DAOS file system. A comparable Aurora Production result scored 32,165.90, with 10,066.09 GiB/s of bandwidth and 102,785.41 kIOPS, which means AICS-A's overall score was about 2.46X higher. In the 10-client category, AICS-B's 7,839.30 was about 2.72X faster than Aurora (which scored 2,885.57). Thus, when initially accepted into the Production lists, the two SCNet submissions displaced Aurora from the top positions in both the main Production and 10-Client Production rankings.
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Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/supercomputers/sanctioned-chinese-supercomputer-maker-stripped-of-io500-benchmark-crown-intel-powered-aurora-retakes-the-lead-record-breaking-parastor-f9000-storage-system-doesnt-meet-reproducibility-requirements#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com/membership
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