[Beowulf] Suggestions to what DFS to use

[John Hanks]

When we were looking at a possible GPFS client license purchase we ran the
client on our nodes and did some basic testing. The client did give us a
bit of a boost in performance over NFS, but still we could tip GPFS over
with a small fraction of our available nodes. The improvement was not
enough to be worth the license cost involved. And it's pretty hard to beat
the added performance of a whole new storage server especially given the
relative costs.

Multiple chunks of storage make it possible to isolate workloads as well.
In the end, price, flexibility and overall performance in our environment
as a whole beat out the slick GPFS sales presentation :) My rule of thumb
is that a salesman in a suit that expensive may seem impressive but
probably doesn't have my best interests in mind.

jbh

On Wed, Feb 15, 2017 at 4:05 AM Christopher Samuel <samuel at unimelb.edu.au>
wrote:

> On 14/02/17 18:31, John Hanks wrote:
> >
> > 1. (~500 TB) DDN SFA12K running gridscaler (GPFS) but without GPFS
> > clients on nodes, this is presented to the cluster through cNFS.
> [...]
> > Depending on your benchmark, 1, 2 or 3 may be faster. GPFS falls over
> > wheezing under load.
>
> I suspect that's more a limitation of NFS than GPFS though in your set
> up.  We've got DDN SFA10K's with GPFS all the way down and that works
> really well for us (so far).
>
> All the best,
> Chris
> --
>  Christopher Samuel        Senior Systems Administrator
>  VLSCI - Victorian Life Sciences Computation Initiative
>  Email: samuel at unimelb.edu.au Phone: +61 (0)3 903 55545
>  http://www.vlsci.org.au/      http://twitter.com/vlsci
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