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

[Jeff Johnson]

Leo,

Both BeeGFS and Lustre require a backend file system on the disks
themselves. Both Lustre and BeeGFS support ZFS backend.

--Jeff


On Thu, Aug 10, 2023 at 1:00 PM leo camilo <lhcamilo at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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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-- 
------------------------------
Jeff Johnson
Co-Founder
Aeon Computing

jeff.johnson at aeoncomputing.com
www.aeoncomputing.com
t: 858-412-3810 x1001   f: 858-412-3845
m: 619-204-9061

4170 Morena Boulevard, Suite C - San Diego, CA 92117

High-Performance Computing / Lustre Filesystems / Scale-out Storage
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