July 18, 2017
The Center for Advanced Technology Evaluation (CENATE) at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) has installed MOUNTAIN DAO, the first Data Vortex two-level system (DV2LTP). MOUNTAIN DAO is a testbed platform that demonstrates the negligible effects of scaling up
the Data Vortex network. Performance on benchmarks important to research science, big data, and cyber security, including the Global FFT, Breadth First Search, Random Access, and Sparse Matrix Vector Multiply, is negligibly affected as layers of DV Switches are added to scale up a system (see below graph). This paves the way for more large systems to be built in the future.
The MOUNTAIN DAO platform is configurable, enabling applications to run with 1 level (L1) of DV switching or 2 levels (L2) of DV switching. This allows users to compare application performance differences as a system scales. When configured as a L2 DV system, MOUNTAIN DAO is setup such that all ports of all switches are completely utilized to demonstrate worst case performance. This provides an advantage to the L1 DV Switch application runs since only ½ the DV switch ports are required when configured for L1 DV Switching, thereby not pushing the performance of the DV Switch during L1 runs, Even with this L1 advantage, the demonstrated L2 applications depict negligible L1 to L2 performance differences demonstrating the linear
MOUNTAIN DAO is comprised of sixteen compute nodes (2 Supermicro F627R3-FTPT+ FatTwin Chassis with 4 servers each), each containing two Data Vortex interface cards (VICs), and 2 Data Vortex Switch Boxes (16 Data Vortex 2 level networks, on 3 switch boards, configured as 4 groups of 4). MOUNTAIN DAO is the second Data Vortex system at CENATE and the third at PNNL. The national lab is also home to PEPSY, a DV205, and JOLT (pictured with MOUNTAIN DAO), a special purpose DV202.
