[Beowulf] NFS alternative for 200 core compute (beowulf) cluster

[leo camilo]

Hi there,

thanks for your response.

BeeGFS indeed looks like a good call option, though realistically I can
only afford to use a single node/server for it.

Would it be feasible to use zfs as volume manager coupled with BeeGFS for
the shares, or should I write zfs off all together?

thanks again,

best,

leo

On Thu, 10 Aug 2023 at 21:29, Bernd Schubert <bernd.schubert at fastmail.fm>
wrote:

>
>
> On 8/10/23 21:18, leo camilo wrote:
> > Hi everyone,
> >
> > I was hoping I would seek some sage advice from you guys.
> >
> > At my department we have build this small prototyping cluster with 5
> > compute nodes,1 name node and 1 file server.
> >
> > Up until now, the name node contained the scratch partition, which
> > consisted of 2x4TB HDD, which form an 8 TB striped zfs pool. The pool is
> > shared to all the nodes using nfs. The compute nodes and the name node
> > and compute nodes are connected with both cat6 ethernet net cable and
> > infiniband. Each compute node has 40 cores.
> >
> > Recently I have attempted to launch computation from each node (40 tasks
> > per node), so 1 computation per node.  And the performance was abysmal.
> > I reckon I might have reached the limits of NFS.
> >
> > I then realised that this was due to very poor performance from NFS. I
> > am not using stateless nodes, so each node has about 200 GB of SSD
> > storage and running directly from there was a lot faster.
> >
> > So, to solve the issue,  I reckon I should replace NFS with something
> > better. I have ordered 2x4TB NVMEs  for the new scratch and I was
> > thinking of :
> >
> >   * using the 2x4TB NVME in a striped ZFS pool and use a single node
> >     GlusterFS to replace NFS
> >   * using the 2x4TB NVME with GlusterFS in a distributed arrangement
> >     (still single node)
> >
> > Some people told me to use lustre,but I reckon that might be overkill.
> > And I would only use a single fileserver machine(1 node).
> >
> > Could you guys give me some sage advice here?
> >
>
> So glusterfs is using fuse, which doesn't have the best performance
> reputation (although hopefully not for long - feel free to search for
> "fuse" + "uring").
>
> If you want to avoid complexity of Lustre, maybe look into BeeGFS. Well,
> I would recommend to look into it anyway (as former developer I'm biased
> again ;) ).
>
>
> Cheers,
> Bernd
>
>
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