[Beowulf] zfs tuning for HJPC/cluster workloads?

[Joe Landman]

Chris Samuel wrote:
> ----- "Joe Landman" <landman at scalableinformatics.com> wrote:
> 
>> I think I understand why they don't want benchmarks published.
> 
> :-)
> 
> Don't forget that FreeBSD 7 includes ZFS support, so
> there's another option for you there.

Not sure we can do this, as the user is looking at Linux and Solaris. 
Introducing a third element might not fly (and the commercial software 
they want to run is restricted to Linux, Windows, and Solaris).

> 
> http://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFS
> 
> https://www.ish.com.au/solutions/articles/freebsdzfs

Maybe we will try benchmarking with that.

>> I just want this file system to be about on par with
>> its Linux counterpart on the same hardware.
> 
> I reckon if you're going to compare apples to apples
> then you probably want to test it against a Linux
> checksumming filesystem, the only real contender
> I'm aware of being btrfs (still pre-alpha).
> 
> http://btrfs.wiki.kernel.org/
> 
> Alternatively you can disable checksumming on a ZFS
> volume and retest it against XFS, etc.
> 
> zfs set checksum=off  foo/bar

I did turn off checksum, zil, and other things.  No dice.  Zfs does not 
appear to do well with hardware accelerated RAID.




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Joseph Landman, Ph.D
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