[Beowulf] GlusterFS 1.2-BENKI (GNU Cluster File System) - Announcement

[Bruno Rocha Coutinho]

As glusterfs is a parallel filesystem, I think that a more valuable 
experiment is comparing it against another parallel filesystem, like 
pvfs2 or lustre, in a distributed environment. This could show the 
performance of glusterfs in its intended setting.


2007/2/9, Mark Hahn <hahn at mcmaster.ca>:

     >> nice graph.  but how does it look if you compare a single glusterfs
     >> brick with a single NFS brick?
     >
     > The purpose of glusterfs has never been to beat NFS in a point to
    point
     > throughput competition,

    sure.  but my point is that comparing some large number of servers
    under protocol X to a single server under protocol Y is not all
    that meaningful.

     > since in real world there are a lot of requests
     > happening in parallel and it is more important to achieve a higher
     > aggregated bandwidth.

    surely a single glusterfs brick can handle more than one request at
    a time,
    though...

     > That being said, it is worthy to note that glusterfs is still
    better than
     > NFS in point-to-point (single NFS brick vs single glusterfs brick).
     >
     > On Gig/E - both nfs and glusterfs peak on the link speed for
    read. for write
     > glusterfs peaks on the link speed, but nfs did not

    that's odd, and indicates that the nfs config you tested was hitting
    disk limits.  and unfortunately, that makes the comparison even less
    comprehensible.  looking at the config again, it appears that the node
    might have just a single disk, which would make the results quite
    expected.

     > On IB - nfs works only with IPoIB, whereas glusterfs does SDP
    (and ib-verbs,
     > from the source repository) and is clearly way faster than NFS.

    "clearly"s like that make me nervous.  to an IB enthusiast, SDP may be
    more aesthetically pleasing, but why do you think IPoIB should be
    noticably
    slower than SDP?  lower cpu overhead, probably, but many people have no
    problem running IP at wirespeed on IB/10GE-speed wires...
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