[Lustre-discuss] Expert Advice Required

[Iain Grant]

Ok, I was on here before and had loads of helpful answers for my testing of lustre.

 

I now need some expert advice for the best solution.

 

At the moment we have a 20 node cluster of dell 3.0ghz boxes.  Which are working quite happily, the issue that will come soon is that we copy the data being worked on to each node before we start. This data is getting larger and at some point will be too big for the storage on the cluster members (it also a large overhead copying to each member before we can start).

 

So, I am looking for a cheap plausible solution for shared storage.

I have configured NFS but the read/write speeds are way to slow and hinder the calculations done by the cluster.

I have also configured Lustre, but forgive me if I am wrong I believe I would need a few OST systems before I can get good throughput with this solution.

Each cluster member has 2 ethernet cards and minimal storage. Only one network interface is used and is connected to a dell 24port Gb switch along with the head node.

The head node does have fiber cards in it and is wired up to a san.

The biggest problem is the data, the data files are large, but all the nodes process the same chunk of that data at the same time.

It would be extremely appreciated if someone could give me an idea on a solution that might fill the bill. Using or not using Lustre.

I basically need to start digging deep into this and finding a solution

Thanks Iain

Iain Grant 
Linux Administrator 
Scottish Crop Research Institute 
Dundee DD2 5DA 
Tel: +44 (0)1382 562731 
mailto:Iain.Grant at scri.ac.uk 
www.scri.ac.uk

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