White Papers

9
Dell EMC HPC Lustre Storage Solution
The Dell EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Lustre Storage, referred to as Dell EMC HPC Lustre Storage is designed for academic and
industry users who need to deploy a fully-supported, easy-to-use, high-throughput, scale-out and cost-effective parallel file system
storage solution. The solution uses the Intel® Enterprise Edition (EE) for Lustre® software v.3.0 [8]. It is a scale-out storage solution
appliance capable of providing a high performance and high availability storage system. Utilizing an intelligent, extensive and intuitive
management interface, the Intel Manager for Lustre (IML) greatly simplifies deploying, managing and monitoring all of the hardware and
storage system components. It is easy to scale in capacity, performance or both, thereby providing a convenient path to expand in the
future.
The Dell EMC HPC Lustre Storage solution utilizes the 13th generation of enterprise Dell EMC PowerEdge™ servers and the latest
generation of high-density PowerVault™ storage products. With full hardware and software support from Dell EMC and Intel, the Dell
EMC Ready Bundle for HPC Lustre Storage solution delivers a superior combination of performance, reliability, density, ease of use
and cost-effectiveness.
Dell EMC PowerEdge R430 as the CIFS Gateway
A Dell EMC PowerEdge R430 is used as the CIFS gateway for transferring data generated by NGS instruments into the Lustre file
system.
Network Components
The Dell EMC HPC System for Life Sciences platform is available with four different high performance networking options ― Intel®
OPA, IB EDR, IB FDR and 10 GbE. The differences in switching infrastructure are shown in Table 1. There is also a Force10 S3048-
ON GbE switch, which is used in both configurations whose purpose is described here. In the IB version, the Dell EMC PowerEdge
FC430 sleds have 2:1 blocking FDR connectivity to the top of rack FDR switch and the Dell EMC PowerEdge C6320 sleds have either
1:1 non-blocking EDR connectivity to the top of rack EDR switch or 1:1 non-blocking Intel® OPA connectivity with H1048-OPF switch.
Force10 S3048-ON switch
In the Intel® OPA or IB configurations, the Force10 S3048-ON switch ports are split into multiple untagged virtual LANs to
accommodate multiple internal networks.
o The port assignment of the Dell EMC Networking S3048-ON switch for the Intel® OPA or IB versions of the solution is as
follows.
Figure 3: Lustre-based storage solution components