[Beowulf] SSD caching for parallel filesystems

[Brock Palen]

I have been thinking about this.  DDN's SFX looks like it might be able to do this at the block level.  I am trying to get them to think that they should do this.

I wonder how much one should have. A quick scan of my robinhood data base shows my 640TB lustre filesystem (50% full) 56TB of data is 1 month old or younger. 

But maybe we don't care about 1 month, maybe 1 week, or 1 hour is enough.  I wonder if an intelligent system could use flash to deal with random write (common random re-reads). and keep the spinning rust getting nice large sequential writes. Getting a lot closer to peak of spinning rust. 

Just my thoughts on this, from long time lurker.

Brock Palen
www.umich.edu/~brockp
CAEN Advanced Computing
brockp at umich.edu
(734)936-1985



On Feb 6, 2013, at 4:36 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:

> Beowulfers,
> 
> I've been reading a lot about using SSD devices to act as caches for 
> traditional spinning disks or filesystems over a network (SAN, iSCSI, 
> SAS, etc.).  For example, Fusion-io had directCache, which works with 
> any block-based storage device (local or remote) and Dell is selling 
> LSI's CacheCade, which will act as a cache for local disks.
> 
> http://www.fusionio.com/data-sheets/directcache/
> httP//www.dell.com/downloads/global/products/pedge/en/perc-h700-cachecade.pdf
> 
> Are there any products like this that would work with parallel 
> filesystems, like Lustre or GPFS? Has anyone done any research in this 
> area? Would this even be worthwhile?
> 
> -- 
> Prentice
> 
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