[lustre-discuss] Do I need Lustre?

[Hebenstreit, Michael]

You can do a simple test. Run a small sample of you application directly out of /dev/shm (the ram-disk). Then run it from the NFS file server. If you measure significant speedups your application is I/O sensitive and a Lustre configured with OPA or other InfiniBand solution will help.

From: lustre-discuss [mailto:lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org] On Behalf Of Thackeray, Neil L
Sent: Friday, April 27, 2018 11:08 AM
To: lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
Subject: [lustre-discuss] Do I need Lustre?

I'm new to the cluster realm, so I'm hoping for some good advice. We are starting up a new cluster, and I've noticed that lustre seems to be used widely in datacenters. The thing is I'm not sure the scale of our cluster will need it.

We are planning a small cluster, starting with 6 -8 nodes with 2 GPUs per node. They will be used for Deep Learning, MRI data processing, and Matlab among other things. With the size of the cluster we figure that 10Gb networking will be sufficient. We aren't going to allow persistent storage on the cluster. Users will just upload and download data. I'm mostly concerned about I/O speeds. I don't know if NFS would be fast enough to handle the data.

We are hoping that the cluster will grow over time. We are already talking about buying more nodes next fiscal year.

Thanks.
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