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BeeGFS on NetApp with E-Series Storage

Design generations

Contributors iamjoemccormick
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The BeeGFS on NetApp solution is currently in its second generational design.

Both the first and second generation include a base architecture that incorporates a BeeGFS file system and an NVMe EF600 storage system. However, the second generation builds on the first to include these additional benefits:

  • Double the performance and capacity while adding only 2U of rack space

  • High availability (HA) based on a shared-disk, two-tier hardware design

  • External qualification for NVIDIA’s DGX A100 SuperPOD and NVIDIA BasePOD Architectures

Second generational design

The second generation of BeeGFS on NetApp is optimized to meet the performance requirements of demanding workloads including high-performance computing (HPC) and HPC-style machine learning (ML), deep learning (DL), and similar artificial intelligence (AI) techniques. By incorporating a shared-disk high-availability (HA) architecture, the BeeGFS on NetApp solution also meets the data durability and availability requirements of enterprises and other organizations that cannot afford downtime or data loss as they look for storage that can scale to keep up with their workloads and use cases. This solution has not only been verified by NetApp, but it also passed external qualification as a storage option for the NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD and DGX BasePOD.

First generational design

The first generation of BeeGFS on NetApp was designed for machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) workloads using NetApp EF600 NVMe storage systems, the BeeGFS parallel file system, NVIDIA DGX™ A100 systems, and NVIDIA® Mellanox® Quantum™ QM8700 200Gbps IB switches. This design also features 200Gbps InfiniBand (IB) for the storage and compute cluster interconnect fabric to provide a completely IB-based architecture for high-performance workloads.

For more information on the first generation, see NetApp EF-Series AI with NVIDIA DGX A100 Systems and BeeGFS.