Dell PowerEdge M420 Manual - Page 10

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Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS

NFS SERVER

CACHE POOL

SSD CONTROLLER

Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 1

Table 4.

CACHING SOFTWARE

Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 2

PCIe SSD DRIVER

Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 2

In DFC vocabulary, the cache or cache pool is the SSDs, and the disk that is enabled for caching is the

virtual disk on the PowerVault MD1200s. Most importantly, the methods used to access the data remain

the same as in the baseline case. The I/O clients simply mount the same NFS exported directory as in

the baseline configuration. Detailed instructions on configuring DFC for this storage solution are

provided in Appendix A: Step-by-step configuration of Dell Fluid Cache for NFS.

2.3. I/O clients test bed

The pure NFS baseline solution and the NFS+DFC solution were exercised using a 64-node HPC cluster.

This compute cluster was used to provide I/O load to the storage solution and help benchmark the

capabilities of the solution.

Using the latest quarter height Dell PowerEdge M420 blade server

cluster, the 64-client cluster was configured in 20U of rack space. Details of the 64-client test bed are

provided in Table 5. Figure 3 shows the entire test bed including the clients. Note that all I/O traffic to

the NFS server used the InfiniBand network and the IPoIB protocol.

Table 3.

Hardware configuration for DFC

Server configuration

PowerEdge R720

Two 350GB Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD

Internal (slot 4)

Storage configuration

Same as baseline, as described in Table 1

Software and firmware configuration for DFC

Software

Dell Fluid Cache for DAS v1.0

Firmware and Drivers

mtip32xx 1.3.7-1 latest available at the time of this study.

Recommend using mtip32xx v2.1.0

as the building block for the I/O