Prior to the 2010s, most computing tasks were run through the now-outdated spinning disk storage format.

Today, advances such as solid-state drives and the pervasive cloud are expanding the capabilities of high-performance computing to harness the power of artificial intelligence.

“Now we are seeing the convergence of AI into HPC, and that brings a challenge with AIOps requiring the highest throughputs for storage performance,” said Shervin Sammak (pictured, left), product manager at Dell Technologies Inc. “We are seeing a lot of more flash specifically with non-volatile memory express blended into HPC. Data protection is important, and with the deployment of data both on-premises and in the public cloud, we’re also object storage also introduced as well.”

Sammak and Anthony Dina (right), director and global field chief technology officer for unstructured data solutions at Dell , spoke with theCUBE industry analyst Dave Vellante at the ISC High Performance event, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed storage keeping pace with other areas of innovation in HPC. (* Disclosure below.)

Workflow optimization is the critical advantage

With high-throughput storage setups in demand, the key advantage they’re driving for research, analytics and data-intensive HPC workflows lies in workflow optimization, according to Dina. Organizations can now manipulate and transpose data in more ways than ever before.

“It’s about continuous operation. Instead of creating data, moving it into the cluster and then bringing it back, job schedulers can move those relevant data sets back into a place where it gets the intensive computational analysis and is then returned,” Dina explained. “It’s about workflow optimization more than anything else.”

Nonvolatile memory express, or NVMe, came onto the scene in the early 2010s. Since then, steady advancements have quadrupled its capabilities, according to Sammak. Additionally, cutting-edge improvements, such as triple-level cells and quad-level cells, are also driving costs down.

“We saw an introduction of peripheral component interconnect express and that revolutionized storage specifically,” Sammak said. “The other one was in NVMe, which started to come in around like 2011. And in the past 15 years, we’ve seen its capabilities increase 4x.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the ISC High Performance event:

(* Disclosure: Dell Technologies Inc. sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither Dell Technologies nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE