White Papers

Dell HPC Lustre Storage solution with Mellanox Infiniband EDR
The continued use of generally available, industry-standard benchmark tools like IOzone and MDtest
provide an easy way to match current and expected growth with the performance outlined. The
profiles reported from each of these tools provide sufficient information to align the configuration of
the Dell HPC Lustre Storage Solution with the requirements of many applications or group of
applications.
The Dell HPC Lustre Storage solution delivers all the benefits of a scale-out parallel file system-based
storage for your high performance computing needs.
Appendix A: Benchmark Command Reference
This section describes the commands used to benchmark the Dell HPC Lustre Storage solution.
IOzone
IOzone Sequential Writes –
iozone -i 0 -c -e -w -r 1024K -I -s $Size -t $Thread -+n -+m /root/list.$Thread
IOzone Sequential Reads -
iozone -i 1 -c -e -w -r 1024K -I -s $Size -t $Thread -+n -+m /root/list.$Thread
IOzone IOPS Random Reads / Writes –
iozone -i 2 -w -c -O -I -r 4K -s $Size -t $Thread -+n -+m /root/list.$Thread
IOzone Command Line
Arguments
Description
-i 0
Write test
-i 1
Read test
-i 2
Random IOPS test
-+n
No retest
-c
Includes close in the timing calculations
-e
Includes flush in the timing calculations
-r
Records size
-s
File size
-+m
Location of clients to run IOzone on when in clustered mode
-I
Use O_Direct
-w
Does not unlink (delete) temporary file
-+n
No retests selected
-O
Return results in OPS
The O_Direct command line parameter (“-I”) allows us to bypass the cache on the compute nodes
where the IOzone threads are running.
MDtest - Metadata
Files Operations -
mpirun -np $Threads -rr --hostfile /share/mdt_clients/mdtlist.$Threads /share/mdtest/mdtest.intel
-v -d /mnt/lustre/perf_test24-1M -i $Reps -b $Dirs -z 1 -L -I $Files -y -u -t -F
MDtest
Command Line Arguments
Description
-d
the directory in which the tests will run
-v
verbosity (each instance of option increments by one)
-i
number of iterations the test will run
-b
branching factor of hierarchical directory structure
-z
depth of hierarchical directory structure
-L
files only at leaf level of tree