Administrator Guide

Performance characterization
19 Dell EMC Ready Solution for HPC PixStor Storage | Document ID
Performance characterization
Benchmarks selected and test beds
To characterize the different components of this Ready Solution, we used the hardware specified in the last
column of Table 1, including the optional High Demand Metadata Module. In order to assess the solution
performance, the following benchmarks were selected:
• IOzone N to N sequential
• IOR N to 1 sequential
• IOzone random
• MDtest
For all benchmarks listed above, the test bed had the clients as described in the Table 2 below, except for
testing the Gateway nodes. Since the number of compute nodes available for testing was only 16, when a
higher number of threads was required, those threads were equally distributed on the compute nodes (i.e. 32
threads = 2 threads per node, 64 threads = 4 threads per node, 128 threads = 8 threads per node, 256
threads =16 threads per node, 512 threads = 32 threads per node, 1024 threads = 64 threads per node). The
intention was to simulate a higher number of concurrent clients with the limited number of compute nodes.
Since the benchmarks support a high number of threads, a maximum value up to 1024 was used (specified
for each test), while avoiding excessive context switching and other related side effects from affecting
performance results.
The software versions listed were used in the initial testing, but as newer versions of the software became
available, the servers and clients were updated. Each performance results section that use different versions
from those listed in Table 1 or Table 2, has the correct version of the software components used.
Table 2 Infiniband Client test bed
Number of Client nodes
16
Client node
C6320
Processors per client node
2 x Intel(R) Xeon(R) Gold E5-2697v4 18 Cores @ 2.30GHz
Memory per client node
12 x 16GiB 2400 MT/s RDIMMs
BIOS
2.8.0
Operating System
CentOS 7.6
OS Kernel
3.10.0-957.10.1
PixStor Software
4.8.3 (Released version 5.1.0.0)
Spectrum Scale (GPFS)
5.0.3
OFED Version
Mellanox OFED 4.3-3.0.2 (Released version Mellanox OFED 4.6-1.0.1.0)
Since the Gateways require a different network to properly test a realistic scenario where NFS and SMB
protocols are used to connect to the PixStor solution, an Ethernet cluster was assembled from 13G servers in
our lab. Since a limited number of machines was gathered, it was decided to use 100 GbE links to maximize
the bandwidth of the clients, while still using a different network. Table 3 below describes the 100 Gb
Ethernet test bed for the Gateway nodes.
Table 3 Ethernet Client test bed (for Gateway nodes)