22:39Machine-translated from Azerbaijani by AIRead in Azerbaijani
Sugon Storage Systems Removed From Main List as Aurora Retakes the Lead
The IO500 committee has removed the all-flash ParaStor F9000 systems made by sanctioned Chinese company Sugon from the Production list. This was due to a lack of sufficient public information about the system’s architecture and the file system not being widely available. Although the systems have been moved to the Research list, they remain among the fastest storage solutions. Meanwhile, Intel-powered Aurora has retaken the lead in the main and 10-client rankings.
IO500 measures the speed of supercomputer data storage systems rather than their computing power. The assessment takes into account data transfer speeds as well as the number of input and output operations performed per second. To be included on the Production list, a system’s architecture must be documented in detail, its file system must be available, and it must be possible to verify the results independently.
The larger SCNet AICS-A system presented at ISC 2026 was tested with 500 client nodes and 64,000 client processors. It achieved an IO500 score of 79,110.05. Its data transfer speed was 26,888.39 GiB/s, while its metadata score was 232,754.76 kIOPS. kIOPS indicates that thousands of operations are performed per second. The metadata score indicates how quickly information such as filenames and directories is processed.
The smaller AICS-B system was tested with 10 clients and 2,560 client processors. The system scored 7,839.30 points. Its data transfer speed was 2,551.40 GiB/s, while its metadata result was 24,086.69 kIOPS. In both submissions, Sugon was listed as the storage hardware manufacturer and ParaStor as the file system.
These results significantly exceeded those of the Aurora system at Argonne National Laboratory. Aurora uses Intel Optane Persistent Memory modules, SSD storage devices, and the DAOS file system. The system achieved a score of 32,165.90, a data transfer speed of 10,066.09 GiB/s, and a metadata result of 102,785.41 kIOPS. Aurora’s test result with 10 clients was 2,885.57 points. Thus, the large SCNet system was 2.46 times faster overall, while the smaller system was 2.72 times faster.
The open-source nature of the DAOS file system played a role in Aurora’s return to the list. The software can be downloaded. Its architecture and hardware requirements are also publicly documented. ParaStor, by contrast, is a closed system. Its limited availability makes independent verification of the results difficult.
The leader of the Research list is the CloudBrain system, which uses Huawei OceanStor A800 storage and the OceanFS file system. The system scored 603,334.56 points. Its sequential data transfer result was 8,291.11 GiB/s, while its random operations result was 43,903,983.64 kIOPS.