Concept Guide

Introduction
4 Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS High Performance Storage | ID 460
1 Introduction
High Performance Computing (HPC) is undergoing transformations that include storage systems technologies
as a driving component. The first major leap in drive technology was the SSD, which owing to lack of moving
parts delivered significantly better random access and read performance compared to HDDs. The second
major leap in drive technology is the introduction of Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) drives which offer
latency savings by removing the scheduler and queueing bottlenecks
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from the block layer. The highlight of
the Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS Storage solution is the use of PowerEdge R740xd servers
equipped with 24x Intel P4600 1.6 TB NVMe, Mixed Use Express Flash drives and two ConnectX-5 InfiniBand
EDR adapters which offers a balanced configuration engineered for high performance. The Dell EMC HPC
BeeGFS Storage Solution is delivered as an all-inclusive storage solution and is available with deployment
services and full hardware and software support from Dell EMC. The solution is designed using standards-
based HPC components and focuses on ease of deployment and ease of use.
This technical white paper describes the configuration of the Dell EMC Ready Solutions for HPC BeeGFS
Storage
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(referred to as Dell EMC BeeGFS Storage Solution in the rest of the document), which is the latest
addition to the HPC storage portfolio. Many types of jobs generate large amount of data while the job is
running, but that data is discarded when the job completes. These jobs do not perform all their computations
purely in memory. Each of the worker threads loads an initial configuration and reads/writes many
intermediate points to disk. In such scenarios, the scratch space is often considered as a limiting factor. It is
often too small or too slow. To tackle this problem, the Dell EMC HPC BeeGFS Storage Solution is being
offered as a scratch solution; a staging ground for transient data that is usually not held beyond the lifetime of
the job. The Dell EMC BeeGFS storage solution uses a flexible building block approach, where individual
building blocks can be combined to offer various configurations to meet customer-specific workloads and use
cases and to provide for future expansion.
This technical white paper describes the architecture of the Dell EMC BeeGFS Storage Solution, the solution
configuration, software, and application versions. The capabilities of the system are quantified by presenting
the benchmark performance for IOzone sequential N-N read and write throughput (GBps) and random read
and write I/O operations per second (IOPS), IOR N-1 performance and metadata tests. An extensive
appendix with details on the benchmarks used and the testing methodology adopted is included at the end of
the document.