# Early Evaluation of Intel Optane Non-Volatile Memory with HPC I/O Workloads

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02199 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.02199/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 7 Aug 2017.

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [An autoencoder compression approach for accelerating large-scale inverse problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.04781/) (2023)
- [MTrainS: Improving DLRM training efficiency using heterogeneous memories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01515/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

High performance computing (HPC) applications have a high requirement on storage speed and capacity. Non-volatile memory is a promising technology to replace traditional storage devices to improve HPC performance. Earlier in 2017, Intel and Micron released first NVM product -- Intel Optane SSDs. Optane is much faster and more durable than the traditional storage device. It creates a bridge to narrow the performance gap between DRAM and storage. But is the existing HPC I/O stack still suitable for new NVM devices like Intel Optane? How does HPC I/O workload perform with Intel Optane? In this paper, we analyze the performance of I/O intensive HPC applications with Optane as a block device and try to answer the above questions. We study the performance from three perspectives: (1) basic read and write bandwidth of Optane, (2) a performance comparison study between Optane and HDD, including checkpoint workload, MPI individual I/O vs. POSIX I/O, and MPI individual I/O vs. MPI collective I/O, and (3) the impact of Optane on the performance of a parallel file system, PVFS2.