1,024 TV Re-Runs at 1.5GB/sec

Reg HPC Community

Now that's what I call streaming!

By Dan Olds, Gabriel Consulting • Get more from this author

Posted in HPC Blog, 25th November 2009 09:39 GMT

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As we’re slowly gathering our wits again after a week of supercomputing fun at SC09, a story from Chris Mellor caught our eye this morning. Chris was writing about Fusion I/O and its newest SSD (Solid State Drive) product, the Fusion ioDrive Octal. These units provide up to 5TB raw storage and can push up to 800,000 IOPS.

We happened by the Fusion I/O booth at SC09 and were immediately fascinated by its massive wall of TV feeds that streamed 16x64 (1,024) DVD-quality video streams of popular shows.

Turns out that all of these streams were coming from a single Fusion ioDrive Duo with a total of 640GB storage. This module can push out reads at 1.5GB/sec and read/writes at 1.3GBs. Definitely enough to satisfy home video streaming needs, although this definitely isn’t the market they’re aiming at! In the video, we accost a Fusion I/O spokesman and – in our halting, jerky, mumbling way – elicit some good technical information from him.

Although the video below doesn’t show it very clearly, each stream was very crisp, and they moved at the correct speed. It was clear that the SSD was pushing data plenty fast enough to handle the streaming workload.

To take a look at our interview, click here.

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