One AMD EPYC Processor Reaches 57 GB/s of Random Storage Bandwidth

AMD wants to drive home the message that they are capable of delivering awe-inspiring performance from a single socket server with a number of demos this afternoon at the EPYC launch event in Austin, Texas. One of the storage demos that they were showing off was of on an AMD EPYC 7601-based 1-socket system with 24 3.2TB Samsung PM1725a 2.5-inch PCIe NVMe SSDs that were over-provisioned to 1.6TB. The end result of this 24 drive setup that costs upwards of $168,000 (24 x $6,999.99 per drive) was pretty impressive.

The live live demo was run using Flexible IO benchmark (FIO) v2.16 and AMD was able to get ~57 GB/s of bandwidth (128KB Random workload) and 435,355 IOPS.

The test was run in an HPE Cloudline CL3150 server running Ubuntu 17.04 4.10 kernel with 256GB of memory (8x32GB PC4-2666). This is actually higher than the speeds they noted in the accompanying presentation slide shown below.

When they switched to a 4K 100% Random test they got an insane 9,178,000 IOPS on the Read and 7,111,000 IOPS on Write. Amazing numbers and that is on a single-socket system! The AMD EPYC 7601 processor was at 75% load during this test, so it takes a tremendous amount of processing power to get 9.1 million IOPS. If you do the math on the 24 PCIe x4 drives you’ll find that 96 of the 128 PCIe lanes are being used. That means there are 32 lanes still available for storage drives! We were told that AMD is working on the software side currently and hopes to have a demo with even more drives in the near future!