Cloud Digital Leader Google Cloud Products and Services Practice Question
A company runs a high-performance computing (HPC) workload on Compute Engine that requires low-latency, high-throughput scratch storage. The workload is checkpointed every hour. Which TWO storage options should the engineer consider for the scratch storage? (Choose 2)
Answer choices
Why each option matters
Answer the question above first, then reveal the full breakdown to understand why each option is right or wrong.
Correct answer & explanation
✓
Persistent Disk (SSD)
For HPC scratch storage, local SSDs provide very high IOPS and low latency but are ephemeral. Persistent Disk balanced or SSD provides durable block storage with good performance, but local SSDs are often preferred for scratch due to lower latency. Cloud Storage is object storage, not block. Filestore is file storage but typically has higher latency than local SSD. The best options are local SSD for performance and Persistent Disk for durability if checkpointed data needs to persist.
Answer analysis
Option-by-option breakdown
For each option: why learners choose it and why it is or isn't the right answer here.
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Persistent Disk (HDD)
Why it's wrong here
HDD Persistent Disk is a network-attached block storage product built on spinning media. It offers significantly lower random IOPS and higher latency than SSD alternatives, making it inadequate for the high-throughput, low-latency I/O patterns typical of HPC scratch workloads. It is better suited for cost-sensitive bulk storage where sequential reads dominate and performance is not critical.
- ✓
Persistent Disk (SSD)
Why this is correct
Persistent Disk (SSD) is a durable, network-attached block storage service that provides consistent, low-latency performance and survives instance termination. For HPC scratch, it can be used when data must persist across restarts or preemption, allowing successful checkpointing and restart without data loss. Its performance scales with provisioned size, and it supports multiple per-instance volumes to meet aggregate throughput needs.
- ✓
Local SSD
Why this is correct
Local SSD is a block device physically attached to the host server, delivering the absolute lowest latency and highest IOPS available on Compute Engine. It is ideal for ephemeral HPC scratch where only the fastest possible storage is acceptable, but data is lost when the VM stops or migrates. Best practice is to pair it with periodic checkpoints to Persistent Disk or Cloud Storage to preserve important intermediate results.
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Filestore
Why it's wrong here
Filestore is a fully managed, network-attached NAS service that uses the NFS protocol. Because all I/O goes over the network and through the file system protocol stack, it has inherently higher latency and lower random I/O throughput than block-based local SSD or Persistent Disk. While convenient for shared datasets, it is not suited for HPC scratch workloads that require very fast, low-latency reads and writes.
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Cloud Storage
Why it's wrong here
Cloud Storage is an object storage system accessed via HTTP, not a block storage interface. It offers high durability, unlimited scalability, and low cost per GB, but it has high latency and no consistent random I/O performance, making it impossible to use as low-latency scratch space. It is appropriate for storing checkpoints, results, and archives, but not for active HPC scratch files.
Go deeper
Related to this question
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Cloud Digital Transformation
Key term
Cloud storage
Cloud storage is a service that lets you save data on remote servers accessed over the internet instead of on your computer's hard drive.
Key term
Filestore
Google Cloud Filestore is a managed file storage service that lets you mount a network file system (NFS) to multiple virtual machines simultaneously, just like a shared folder on an office network.
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Written by Johnson Ajibi, MSc IT Security
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