Concept Guide

Benchmarks and test tools
27 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS High Performance Storage | ID 460
A Benchmarks and test tools
1) The IOzone benchmark tool was used to measure sequential N to N read- and write throughput
(GB/s) and random read- and write I/O operations per second (IOPS).
2) The IOR benchmark tool was used to measure sequential N to 1 read- and write throughput (GB/s).
3) The MDtest benchmark was used for files only (no directories metadata), to get the number of
creates, stats, reads and removes the solution can handle when using empty files.
4) Intel Data Center Tool was used for Management and Firmware update of Intel P4600NVMe SSDs.
The following sub sections 1 to 3 provide the command line reference and describe the various options used
in the commands to run the respective benchmarks. The sub section 4 describes how the Intel Data Center
Tool was used for management of the NVMe drives.
A.1 IOzone
The IOzone tests were run from 1–32 nodes in clustered mode. All tests were N-to-N. Meaning, N client
threads would read or write N independent files. The command used to run the IOzone benchmarks are given
below:
IOzone Sequential Tests
Sequential Writes
iozone -i 0 -i 1 -c -e -w -r 1m -I -s $Size -t $Thread -+n -+m
/path/to/threadlist
Sequential Reads
iozone -i 0 -i 1 -c -e -w -r 1m -I -s $Size -t $Thread -+n -+m
/path/to/threadlist
By using -c and -e in the test, IOzone provides a more realistic view of what a typical application is doing.
IOzone Random Writes/ Reads
iozone -i 2 -w -c -O -I -r 4K -s $Size -t $Thread -+n -+m /path/to/threadlist
The O_Direct command line parameter allows us to bypass the cache on the compute node on which we
are running the IOzone thread. The following table describes IOzone command line arguments.
Appendix A — IOzone command line arguments
IOzone Argument
Description
-i 0
Write test
-i 1
Read test
-i 2
Random Access test
-+n
No retest
-c
Includes close in the timing calculations