[Beowulf] Suggestions to what DFS to use

Mon Feb 13 23:31:00 PST 2017

I can't compare it to Lustre currently, but in the theme of general, we
have 4 major chunks of storage:

1. (~500 TB) DDN SFA12K running gridscaler (GPFS) but without GPFS clients
on nodes, this is presented to the cluster through cNFS.

2. (~250 TB) SuperMicro 72 bay server. Running CentOS 6.8, ZFS presented
via NFS

3. (~ 460 TB) SuperMicro 90 dbay JBOD fronted by a SuperMIcro 2u server
with 2 x LSI 3008 SAS/SATA cards. Running CentOS 7.2, ZFS and BeeGFS
2015.xx. BeeGFS clients on all nodes.

4. (~ 12 TB) SuperMicro 48 bay NVMe server, running CentOS 7.2, ZFS
presented via NFS

Depending on your benchmark, 1, 2 or 3 may be faster. GPFS falls over
wheezing under load. ZFS/NFS single server falls over wheezing under
slightly less load. BeeGFS tends to fall over a bit more gracefully under
load.  Number 4, NVMe doesn't care what you do, your load doesn't impress
it at all, bring more.

We move workloads around to whichever storage has free space and works best
and put anything metadata or random I/O-ish that will fit onto the NVMe
based storage.

Now, in the theme of specific, why are we using BeeGFS and why are we
currently planning to buy about 4 PB of supermicro to put behind it? When
we asked about improving the performance of the DDN, one recommendation was
to buy GPFS client licenses for all our nodes. The quoted price was about
100k more than we wound up spending on the 460 additional TB of Supermicro
storage and BeeGFS, which performs as well or better. I fail to see the
inherent value of DDN/GPFS that makes it worth that much of a premium in
our environment. My personal opinion is that I'll take hardware over
licenses any day of the week. My general grumpiness towards vendors isn't
improved by the DDN looking suspiciously like a SuperMicro system when I
pull the shiny cover off. Of course, YMMV certainly applies here. But
there's also that incident where we had to do an offline fsck to clean up
some corrupted GPFS foo and the mmfsck tool had an assertion error, not a
warm fuzzy moment...

Last example, we recently stood up a small test cluster built out of
workstations and threw some old 2TB drives in every available slot, then
used BeeGFS to glue them all together. Suddenly there is a 36 TB filesystem
where before there was just old hardware. And as a bonus, it'll do
sustained 2 GB/s for streaming large writes. It's worth a look.

jbh

On Tue, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:02 AM, Jon Tegner <tegner at renget.se> wrote:

> BeeGFS sounds interesting. Is it possible to say something general about
> how it compares to Lustre regarding performance?
>
> /jon
>
>
> On 02/13/2017 05:54 PM, John Hanks wrote:
>
> We've had pretty good luck with BeeGFS lately running on SuperMicro
> vanilla hardware with ZFS as the underlying filesystem. It works pretty
> well for the cheap end of the hardware spectrum and BeeGFS is free and
> pretty amazing. It has held up to abuse under a very mixed and heavy
> workload and we can stream large sequential data into it fast enough to
> saturate a QDR IB link, all without any in depth tuning. While we don't
> have redundancy (other than raidz3), BeeGFS can be set up with some
> redundancy between metadata servers and mirroring between storage.
> http://www.beegfs.com/content/
>
> jbh
>
> On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 7:40 PM Alex Chekholko <alex.chekholko at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
>> If you have a preference for Free Software, GlusterFS would work, unless
>> you have many millions of small files. It would also depend on your
>> available hardware, as there is not a 1-to-1 correspondence between a
>> typical GPFS setup and a typical GlusterFS setup. But at least it is free
>> and easy to try out. The mailing list is active, the software is now mature
>> ( I last used GlusterFS a few years ago) and you can buy support from Red
>> Hat if you like.
>>
>> Take a look at the RH whitepapers about typical GlusterFS architecture.
>>
>> CephFS, on the other hand, is not yet mature enough, IMHO.
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 8:31 AM Justin Y. Shi <shi at temple.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Maybe you would consider Scality (http://www.scality.com/) for your
>> growth concerns. If you need speed, DDN is faster in rapid data ingestion
>> and for extreme HPC data needs.
>>
>> Justin
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 13, 2017 at 4:32 AM, Tony Brian Albers <tba at kb.dk> wrote:
>>
>> On 2017-02-13 09:36, Benson Muite wrote:
>> > Hi,
>> >
>> > Do you have any performance requirements?
>> >
>> > Benson
>> >
>> > On 02/13/2017 09:55 AM, Tony Brian Albers wrote:
>> >> Hi guys,
>> >>
>> >> So, we're running a small(as in a small number of nodes(10), not
>> >> storage(170TB)) hadoop cluster here. Right now we're on IBM Spectrum
>> >> Scale(GPFS) which works fine and has POSIX support. On top of GPFS we
>> >> have a GPFS transparency connector so that HDFS uses GPFS.
>> >>
>> >> Now, if I'd like to replace GPFS with something else, what should I
>> use?
>> >> It needs to be a fault-tolerant DFS, with POSIX support(so that users
>> >> can move data to and from it with standard tools).
>> >>
>> >> I've looked at MooseFS which seems to be able to do the trick, but are
>> >> there any others that might do?
>> >>
>> >> TIA
>> >>
>> >
>>
>> Well, we're not going to be doing a huge amount of I/O. So performance
>> requirements are not high. But ingest needs to be really fast, we're
>> talking tens of terabytes here.
>>
>> /tony
>>
>> --
>> Best regards,
>>
>> Tony Albers
>> Systems administrator, IT-development
>> Royal Danish Library, Victor Albecks Vej 1, 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark.
>> Tel: +45 2566 2383 / +45 8946 2316
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