[Lustre-discuss] How to achieve 20GB/s file system throughput?

[Bernd Schubert]

On Saturday, July 24, 2010, Henry_Xu at dell.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> 
> 
> One of my customer want to set up HPC with thousands of compute nodes.
> The parallel file system should have 20GB/s throughput. I am not sure
> whether lustre can make it. How many IO nodes needed to achieve this
> target?
> 
> 
> 
> My assumption is 100 or more IO nodes(rack servers) are needed.
> 

I'm a bit prejudiced, of course, but with DDN storage that would be quite 
simple. With the older DDN S2A 9990, you can get 5GB/s per controller-pair , 
with the newer SFA10000 you can get 6.5 to 7GB/s (we are still tuning it) per 
controller pair.
Each controller pair (couplet in DDN terms) usually has 4 servers connected 
and fits into single rack in a 300 drive configuration.
So you can get 20GB/s with 3 or 4 racks and 12 or 16 OSS servers, which is 
much below your 100 IO nodes ;)

Cheers,
Bernd

-- 
Bernd Schubert
DataDirect Networks