[Beowulf] posting bonnie++ stats from our cluster: any comments about my I/O performance stats?

[Rahul Nabar]

I now ran bonnie++ but have trouble figuring out if my perf. stats are
up to the mark or not. My original plan was to only estimate the IOPS
capabilities of my existing storage setup. But then again I am quite
ignorant about the finer nuances. Hence I thought maybe I should post
the stats. here and if anyone has comments I'd very much appreciate
hearing them. In any case, maybe my stats help someone else sometime!
I/O stats on live HPC  systems seem hard to find.

Data posted below. Since this is an NFS store I ran bonnie++ from both
a NFS client compute node and the server. (head node)

Server side bonnie++
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/118481/io_benchmarks/bonnie_op.html

Client side bonnie++
http://dl.getdropbox.com/u/118481/io_benchmarks/bonnie_op_node25.html


Caveat: The cluster was in production so there is a chance of
externalities affecting my data. (am trying it hard to explain why
some stats seem better on the client run than the server run)

Subsidary Goal: This setup had 23 clients for NFS. In a new cluster
that I am setting up we want to scale this up about 250 clients. Hence
want to estimate what sort of performance I'll be looking for in the
Storage. (I've found most conversations with vendors pretty
non-productive with them weaving vague terms and staying as far away
from quantitative estimates as is possible.)

(Other specs: Gigabit ethernet. RAID5 array of 5 total SAS 10k RPM
disks. Total storage ~ 1.5 Terabyte; both server and client have 16GB
RAM; Dell 6248 switches. Port bonding on client servers)

-- 
Rahul