WEKA says it has topped all five component test scenarios using HPE PCIe Gen 5 hardware in the SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark.
There are five workload scenarios in this benchmark: AI image processing, representative of AI Tensorflow image processing environments; Electronic Design Automation (EDA); Genomics; Software Builds; and Video Data Acquisition (VDA). The workload results include jobs or builds, overall response time (ORT), and other measures detailed in a supplier’s submission on the results webpage. WEKA supplied mostly winning on-premises results using Samsung SSDs in January 2022. It then beat other suppliers again in four of the five categories in March 2024. Now it is in front with every workload.
Boni Bruno, WEKA director for Performance Engineering and Technical Marketing, blogs: “WEKA on the … HPE Alletra Storage Server 4110, powered by Intel Xeon processors, set new records on January 28, 2025, securing the No. 1 ranking across all five SPECstorage Solution 2020 benchmark workloads … Our combined solution not only raised the bar by setting new records for jobs and streams across all workloads – it also delivered significantly lower latency – in some cases up to 6.5x lower than previous records.”
The results were better than WEKA’s March 2024 runs, where it used public cloud instances. Two tables show the vendor submitted results for the AI Image and EDA workloads:
In its latest test results, WEKA slightly more than doubled its AI Image performance, and with lower latency, and increased the number of its EDA blended job sets by 2.7x, again with lower latency.
Charts, plotting job output counts against ORT (latency), show the distance between WEKA and the other vendors:
We believe that this surge in WEKA’s benchmark speed is due to the accelerative effect of the PCIe Gen 5 bus, linking the NVMe SSDs to the system’s memory, used in the Alletra 4110 storage server, rather than to vastly improved WEKA software since March last year.
Bruno says: “The records were achieved using a single, consistent configuration across the five SPECstorage benchmarks without the need for workload-specific tuning … These improvements translate to faster AI training, reduced semiconductor simulation delays, quicker genomic analysis, and more responsive video analytics.”
His blog details the Alletra 4110 hardware configuration and provides more details on the individual benchmark runs.
As far as AI training and inference are concerned, this benchmark is less hotly contested than the MLPerf benchmark, where DDN and Hammerspace, for example, do better than WEKA in terms of keeping a number of GPUs active with 90 percent or greater utilization.
WEKA’s advantage in the SPECstorage Solution benchmark is that it has accomplished a clean sweep across all the workloads. Now we wait and watch until other suppliers, such as Qumulo and NetApp, try out their software with PCIe Gen 5 hardware.
