[Beowulf] Varying performance across identical cluster nodes.

[Prentice Bisbal]

Good question. I just checked using vmstat. When running xhpl on both 
systems, vmstat shows only zeros for si and so, even long after the 
performance degrades on the nfsroot instance. Just to be sure, I 
double-checked with top, which shows 0k of swap being used.

Prentice

On 09/13/2017 02:15 PM, Scott Atchley wrote:
> Are you swapping?
>
> On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 2:14 PM, Andrew Latham <lathama at gmail.com 
> <mailto:lathama at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     ack, so maybe validate you can reproduce with another nfs root.
>     Maybe a lab setup where a single server is serving nfs root to the
>     node. If you could reproduce in that way then it would give some
>     direction. Beyond that it sounds like an interesting problem.
>
>     On Wed, Sep 13, 2017 at 12:48 PM, Prentice Bisbal
>     <pbisbal at pppl.gov <mailto:pbisbal at pppl.gov>> wrote:
>
>         Okay, based on the various responses I've gotten here and on
>         other lists, I feel I need to clarify things:
>
>         This problem only occurs when I'm running our NFSroot based
>         version of the OS (CentOS 6). When I run the same OS installed
>         on a local disk, I do not have this problem, using the same
>         exact server(s).  For testing purposes, I'm using LINPACK, and
>         running the same executable  with the same HPL.dat file in
>         both instances.
>
>         Because I'm testing the same hardware using different OSes,
>         this (should) eliminate the problem being in the BIOS, and
>         faulty hardware. This leads me to believe it's most likely a
>         software configuration issue, like a kernel tuning parameter,
>         or some other software configuration issue.
>
>         These are Supermicro servers, and it seems they do not provide
>         CPU temps. I do see a chassis temp, but not the temps of the
>         individual CPUs. While I agree that should be the first thing
>         I look at, it's not an option for me. Other tools like FLIR
>         and Infrared thermometers aren't really an option for me, either.
>
>         What software configuration, either a kernel a parameter,
>         configuration of numad or cpuspeed, or some other setting,
>         could affect this?
>
>         Prentice
>
>         On 09/08/2017 02:41 PM, Prentice Bisbal wrote:
>
>             Beowulfers,
>
>             I need your assistance debugging a problem:
>
>             I have a dozen servers that are all identical hardware:
>             SuperMicro servers with AMD Opteron 6320 processors. Every
>             since we upgraded to CentOS 6, the users have been
>             complaining of wildly inconsistent performance across
>             these 12 nodes. I ran LINPACK on these nodes, and was able
>             to duplicate the problem, with performance varying from
>             ~14 GFLOPS to 64 GFLOPS.
>
>             I've identified that performance on the slower nodes
>             starts off fine, and then slowly degrades throughout the
>             LINPACK run. For example, on a node with this problem,
>             during first LINPACK test, I can see the performance drop
>             from 115 GFLOPS down to 11.3 GFLOPS. That constant,
>             downward trend continues throughout the remaining tests.
>             At the start of subsequent tests, performance will jump up
>             to about 9-10 GFLOPS, but then drop to 5-6 GLOPS at the
>             end of the test.
>
>             Because of the nature of this problem, I suspect this
>             might be a thermal issue. My guess is that the processor
>             speed is being throttled to prevent overheating on the
>             "bad" nodes.
>
>             But here's the thing: this wasn't a problem until we
>             upgraded to CentOS 6. Where I work, we use a read-only
>             NFSroot filesystem for our cluster nodes, so all nodes are
>             mounting and using the same exact read-only image of the
>             operating system. This only happens with these SuperMicro
>             nodes, and only with the CentOS 6 on NFSroot. RHEL5 on
>             NFSroot worked fine, and when I installed CentOS 6 on a
>             local disk, the nodes worked fine.
>
>             Any ideas where to look or what to tweak to fix this? Any
>             idea why this is only occuring with RHEL 6 w/ NFS root OS?
>
>
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>
>
>
>     -- 
>     - Andrew "lathama" Latham lathama at gmail.com
>     <mailto:lathama at gmail.com> http://lathama.com <http://lathama.org> -
>
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