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Dell Storage for HPC with Intel Enterprise Edition 2.3 for Lustre sofware
4. Performance Evaluation and Analysis
The performance studies presented in this paper profile the capabilities of the Dell Storage for HPC
with Intel EE for Lustre Solution 240-drive configuration. The configuration has 240 – 4TB disk drives
(960TB raw space). The goal is to quantify the capabilities of the solution, points of peak performance
and the most appropriate methods for scaling. The client test bed used to provide I/O workload to test
the solution is a Dell HPC compute cluster based on the PowerEdge M610 blade servers, with
configuration as described in Table 1.
A number of performance studies were executed, stressing the configuration with different types of
workloads to determine the limitations of performance and define the sustainability of that
performance. InfiniBand was used for these studies since its high speed and low latency allows getting
the maximum performance from Dell Storage for HPC with Intel EE for Lustre, avoiding network
bottlenecks.
We generally try to maintain a “standard and consistent” testing environment and methodology. There
may be some areas where we purposely optimize server or storage configurations, as well as take
measures to limit caching effects. The goal is to better illustrate the impact to performance. This
paper will detail the specifics of such configurations.
Table 1: Test Client Cluster Details
Component
Description
Compute Nodes:
Dell PowerEdge M610, 64 nodes
Node BIOS:
6.3.0
Processors:
Two Intel Xeon™ X5650 @ 2.67GHz six core processors
Memory:
24GB DDR3 1333MHz
Interconnect:
InfiniBand - Mellanox Technologies M3601Q (QDR)
Lustre:
Lustre 2.5.37 + Mellanox OFED Client
OS:
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.6 (2.6.32-
504.16.2.el6.x86_64)
IB SOFTWARE:
Mellanox OFED 2.4
Performance analysis was focused on three key performance markers:
 Throughput, data sequentially transferred in GB/s.
 I/O Operations per second (IOPS).
 Metadata Operations per second (OP/s).
The goal is a broad but accurate review of the capabilities of the Dell Storage for HPC with Intel EE for
Lustre. We selected two benchmarks to accomplish our goal: IOzone and MDtest.
There are two types of file access methods used with the benchmarks. The first file access method is
N-to-N, where every thread of the benchmark (N clients) writes to a different file (N files) on the
storage system. IOzone and IOR can both be configured to use the N-to-N file-access method. For this
study, we use IOzone for N-to-N access method workloads. The second file access method is N-to-1,
where every thread writes to the same file (N clients, 1 file). For this study, we use IOR for N-to-1
access method workloads. IOR can use MPI-IO, HDF5, or POSIX to run N-to-1 file-access tests. For
purpose of our analysis, we used POSIX. N-to-1 testing determines how the file system handles the
overhead introduced with multiple concurrent requests when multiple threads write or read to the