ParaStor F9000 Removed From IO500 Production List

The decision was made after a review of the submission for the ISC26 event. According to a statement from the IO500 Committee, the Sugon submission was transferred from the Production List to the Research List because it did not satisfy the criteria for the highest level of Reproducibility. The committee specifically noted a lack of widely available architectural details and limited general availability of the file system. Consequently, the previous number one position on the Production and Production 10-Client lists, held by Argonne's DAOS system, has been restored.

IO500 serves as the storage counterpart to the TOP500 list. Rather than ranking supercomputers by computational performance, it ranks High-Performance Computing (HPC) storage systems based on their I/O performance, measuring overall bandwidth and I/O operations. To qualify for the Production list, a system must meet strict reproducibility standards. This means the architecture must be sufficiently documented, and the underlying file system must be generally available so that results can be independently understood and reproduced.

In the case of Aurora, while it is unlikely that an individual could replicate its 230PB storage subsystem in a home environment, its architecture and software can be independently examined and reproduced on a smaller scale. This is possible because DAOS (Data Access Service) is open source, downloadable, and extensively documented. It has publicly available architecture, implementation details, and hardware/software requirements, which satisfies the reproducibility criteria.

By contrast, Sugon's ParaStor is proprietary and far less transparent. The IO500 committee stated that the F9000 submission lacked widely available architectural details and that the file system had limited general availability. This prevents independent examination and reproduction sufficient to meet the Production list's reproducibility standard. The same classification applies to other proprietary architectures developed in China, such as Huawei's OceanFS and SuperFS, which are also included on the Research list.

The Research IO500 list is currently led by Pengcheng Laboratory's CloudBrain system, which uses Huawei OceanStor A800 storage and the OceanFS file system. This system achieved an IO500 score of 603,334.56, with 8,291.11 GiB/s of sequential throughput and 43,903,983.64 KIOPS random performance. Interestingly, while Pengcheng Laboratory's CloudBrain and CloudBrain-II submissions are clearly marked as 'proprietary' in the reproducibility column of the Research IO500 list, the SCNet-A submission carries a 'fully reproducible' badge, highlighting the varying levels of transparency among different systems on the list.