[Beowulf] SSDs for HPC?

[Lockwood, Glenn]

On Apr 7, 2014, at 11:53 AM, Prentice Bisbal <prentice.bisbal at rutgers.edu> wrote:

> 4. SSDs wearing out. Is that still a concern, or are lifespans getting better?I think Jim Lux once did calculations on that list to show that with wear-leveling and everything else, even if you wrote to an SSD constantly, it would still outlive the average lifespan of a cluster.

As long as you use enterprise-grade SSDs (e.g., Intel's stuff) with overprovisioning, the nand endurance shouldn't be an issue over the lifetime of a cluster.  We've used SSDs as our nodes' system disks for a few years now (going on four with our oldest, 324-node production system), and there have been no major problems.  The major problems happened when we were using the cheaper commodity SSDs.  Don't give in to the temptation to save a few pennies there.

Glenn