Sugon의 기록적 ParaStor F9000 스토리지 시스템이 재현성 검사 실패로 IO500 Production 벤치마크 1위를 박탈당하고 Research 카테고리로 옮겨졌으며, Intel Aurora가 최고 순위를 탈환했다.

The IO500 Committee has removed storage subsystems based on Sugon's ParaStor F9000 all-flash storage systems from its Production IO500 list, citing insufficient reproducibility standards. The machines have been moved to the Research IO500 list, where they remain among the world's highest-performing storage devices. Intel's Aurora has retaken the top position on the Production ranking as a result.

"After further review, the Sugon ISC26 submission has been transferred from the Production List to the Research List, as it did not satisfy the criteria for the highest level of Reproducibility due to the lack of widely available architectural details and limited general availability of the file system," the IO500 Committee stated. "Accordingly, the previous #1 position on the Production and Production 10-Client lists (Argonne's DAOS system) has been restored."

IO500 functions as the storage equivalent to the TOP500 supercomputer ranking, measuring HPC storage system performance by I/O throughput and bandwidth rather than raw computational speed.

At ISC 2026, SCNet submitted two systems based on Sugon's ParaStor storage software and F9000 all-flash infrastructure. The larger AICS-A submission ran the IO500 benchmark across 500 client nodes with 64,000 client processors, achieving a score of 79,110.05, with 26,888.39 GiB/s of bandwidth and 232,754.76 kIOPS of metadata performance. The smaller AICS-B employed 10 clients with 2,560 processors, scoring 7,839.30 with 2,551.40 GiB/s and 24,086.69 kIOPS. Both identified Sugon as the storage vendor and ParaStor as the file system.

These results substantially outpaced Argonne National Laboratory's Aurora, which uses a custom storage subsystem featuring Intel's Optane Persistent Memory, SSDs, and the DAOS file system. Aurora's comparable Production score was 32,165.90, with 10,066.09 GiB/s of bandwidth and 102,785.41 kIOPS—making AICS-A approximately 2.46 times faster overall. In the 10-client category, AICS-B's 7,839.30 was roughly 2.72 times faster than Aurora's 2,885.57 score. Upon initial acceptance to the Production lists, both SCNet submissions displaced Aurora from the top positions in both rankings.

Like the TOP500, the IO500 accepts entirely bespoke storage subsystems built on specialized hardware and custom parallel file systems. However, Production-list submissions must satisfy the highest reproducibility standard: architecture must be sufficiently documented and the underlying file system generally available so results can be independently verified and reproduced.

While reproducing Aurora's 230PB storage subsystem at smaller scales remains challenging, its architecture and software can be independently examined because DAOS is open source, extensively documented, and publicly accessible with full implementation details and hardware/software requirements transparently published.

By contrast, Sugon's ParaStor is proprietary and lacks transparency. The IO500 determined that the F9000 submission lacked widely available architectural details and that the file system had limited general availability, preventing independent examination sufficient to meet Production-list standards.

The same restriction applies to other proprietary Chinese architectures including Huawei's OceanFS and SuperFS, which appear on the Research list. The Research IO500 is currently led by Pengcheng Laboratory's CloudBrain system, which uses Huawei's OceanStor A800 storage with the OceanFS file system. It achieved an IO500 score of 603,334.56 with 8,291.11 GiB/s of sequential throughput and 43,903,983.64 KIOPS random performance.

Notably, while Pengcheng Laboratory's CloudBrain and CloudBrain-II submissions are explicitly marked as proprietary in the Research IO500 list's reproducibility column, the SCNet AICS-A submission carries a "fully reproducible" badge.