Google Cloud today announced beta availability of Filestore High Scale, a new file storage tier that adds a scale-out storage capability for customers running high-performance computing workloads.

Described as the next step in the evolution of Google’s Cloud Filestore service, Filestore High Scale integrates the capabilities Google obtained with its $200 million acquisition of data storage startup Elastifile Ltd. in July last year. The new tier enables users to deploy shared file systems that can scale out to hundreds of thousands of input/output operations per second, with tens of gigabytes per second throughput and hundreds of terabytes of capacity.

“Whether migrating traditional applications, modernizing existing applications with Kubernetes, or scaling to meet the performance demands of big compute workloads, Filestore can now address these challenges,” Google product managers Tad Hunt and Allon Cohen wrote in a blog post announcing the launch.

Early adopters have already put Filestore High Scale to use. Christoph Gorgulla, a postdoctoral research fellow at Harvard Medical School’s Wagner Lab, uses the service to enable a virtual screening program called VirtualFlow that aims to discover potential treatments for COVID-19. Virtual screening enables the lab to test billions of small molecules against a target protein as part of the drug discovery process, and it’s much faster than traditional methods, Gorgulla explained.

“We needed a file system that could handle the load generated concurrently by thousands of clients, which have hundreds of thousands of vCPUs,” Gorgulla said. “Much of the Filestore setup is automated, we’re able to scale up our capacity on the fly, and also actively monitor the speed of our workflows in a simple, graphical interface. VirtualFlow can massively reduce the time required for drug and treatment discovery, which will hopefully lead to faster development of therapeutics for COVID-19 and other diseases.”

Other workloads that can benefit from Filestore High Scale’s scale-out storage include electronic design automation, financial modeling, genomics and video processing, Google said.

“File storage is a critical component of HPC applications, and Filestore High Scale is built to address those needs,” Hunt and Cohen wrote. “That includes predictable performance for scale-out file storage in the cloud, and the ability to scale up and scale down a file system on demand. Understanding the costs associated with the performance that you need makes it much easier to architect your solution and optimize based on changing workload demands.”

As a fully managed cloud service, Filestore High Scale is also notable for its ease of use, they said. It’s possible to spin up instances with just a few clicks and automate management via Google Cloud or application programming interface calls. The service also works with Google Cloud Monitoring, which keeps an eye on the file system’s health, and can be integrated with various HPC workload management scheduling systems. Google also added a new access control feature for more advanced security requirements.

Constellation Research Inc. analyst Holger Mueller told SiliconANGLE that HPC applications require a scalable storage solution that’s able to keep up, serve and store the large volumes of data they need to run.

“Google is ramping up its high-performance storage ability with this Filestore High Scale offering,” Mueller said. “It’s good to see it has already made a difference with COVID-19 research, and equally good to see Google’s acquisition of Elastifile bearing fruit.”

Image: Google