Sanctioned Chinese Supercomputer Maker Sugon's ParaStor F9000 Removed from IO500 Production List

IO500 Committee Decision

The IO500 Committee removed storage subsystems based on Sugon's ParaStor F9000 all-flash storage systems from its Production IO500 list. The reason given was that the system did not meet reproducibility requirements, specifically lacking sufficient architecture details and general availability.

As a result, these systems have been reclassified and moved to the Research IO500 list. The committee's statement confirmed that the previous number one position on the Production and Production 10-Client lists, held by Argonne's DAOS system (Intel's Aurora), has been restored.

Background on IO500 Rankings

The IO500 is a benchmark that ranks High-Performance Computing (HPC) storage systems based on their I/O performance, measuring overall bandwidth and I/O operations. It serves as a counterpart to the TOP500 list, which ranks supercomputers by computational performance.

Previous Performance of ParaStor F9000

At ISC 2026, SCNet submitted two systems utilizing ParaStor storage software and F9000 all-flash storage. The larger SCNet AICS-A submission achieved an IO500 score of 79,110.05, with 26,888.39 GiB/s of bandwidth and 232,754.76 kIOPS of metadata performance.

These results significantly surpassed Argonne National Laboratory's Aurora, which scored 32,165.90. The AICS-A's overall score was approximately 2.46 times higher than Aurora's, initially displacing Aurora from the top positions in both main Production and 10-Client Production rankings.

Impact on Rankings

The removal of Sugon's systems from the Production list means that Intel's Aurora, which uses a custom storage subsystem with Optane Persistent Memory modules, SSDs, and the DAOS file system, has retaken the top spot. This adjustment reflects the IO500 Committee's emphasis on transparency and accessibility for systems on its Production list.