Optimizing Performance of HPC Storage Systems

The performance of HPC storage systems depend upon a variety of factors. The results of using any of the standard benchmark suites for storage depends not only on the storage architecture, but also on the type of disk drives, type and design of the interconnect, and the type and number of clients. In addition, each of the benchmark suites have a number of different parameters and test methodologies that require careful analysis to determine the optimal settings for a successful benchmark run. To reliably benchmark a storage solution, every stage of the solution needs to be analyzed including block and file performance of the RAID, network and client throughput to the entire filesystem and meta data servers. For a filesystem to perform at peak performance, there needs to be a balance between the actual performance of the disk drives, the SAS chain supporting the RAID sets, the RAID code used (whether hardware RAID controllers or software MD-RAID), the interconnect and finally the clients. This paper describes these issues with respect to the Lustre filesystem. The dependence of benchmark results with respect to various parameters is shown. Using a single storage enclosure consisting of 8 RAID sets (8+2 drives each) it is possible achieve both read and write performances in excess of 6 GB/s which translates to more than 36 GB/s per rack of measured client based throughput. This paper will focus on using Linux performance tool, obdfiltersurvey, and IOR to measure different levels of the filesystem performance using Lustre. Keywords—HPC Storage, Benchmarking,