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Dell Storage for HPC with Intel Enterprise Edition for Lustre sofware
Figure 8: Intel Manager for Lustre (IML) interface
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 240-drive configuration. The configuration has 240 – 4TB disk drives (960 TB 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.
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:
24GiB DDR3 1333MHz
Interconnect:
InfiniBand - Mellanox Technologies M3601Q (QDR)