[lustre-discuss] Do I need Lustre?

[E.S. Rosenberg]

We never had a budget sufficient to buy a large SSD-only storage so can't
say anything about that.
Our NFS filers tend to crumple when users start genuinely running jobs
against them and this tends to affect both the jobs and also any other
processes/users who are trying to use the filers.
Of course it depends on the load type where a single IO process can get
really good performance but once you have multiple threads doing IO to
different files the NFS servers start to thrash.
Of course this is also possible with an underspecced Parallel filesystem
but so far we have had far less issues with Lustre.
HTH,
Eli


On Tue, May 1, 2018 at 1:10 AM, Dilger, Andreas <andreas.dilger at intel.com>
wrote:

> On Apr 30, 2018, at 07:11, Thackeray, Neil L <neilt at illinois.edu> wrote:
> >
> > Sorry, I left out file size. We don't foresee growing tremendously. The
> plan is for researchers to upload their data, get the results, and copy it
> down to a mounted file system. This is going to be used by multiple
> researchers, and we will be charging for compute time. We really don't want
> this cluster to be used for storing data outside of the time needed for
> their computations. We may just start with 100TB of SSD storage.
>
> One of the major benefits of Lustre is that it can be used directly for
> large-scale computing.  Having users copy data to/from Lustre is fairly
> inefficient (though surprisingly copying files to/from a direct Lustre
> mount can be faster than FTP or SCP or other network copy tools).
>
> You'd be better off to increase the size of your Lustre filesystem, enough
> that users can store "projects" there for some time while they compute,
> rather than needing to move the data on/off the filesystem a lot.
>
> While using an all-SSD filesystem is appealing, you might find better
> performance with some kind of hybrid storage, like ZFS + L2ARC + Metadata
> Allocation Class (this feature is in development, target 2018-09, depending
> on your timeframe).
>
> You definitely want your MDT(s) to be SSDs, especially if you use the new
> Data-on-MDT feature to store small files tehre.  The OSTs can be HDDs to
> give you a lot more capacity for the same price.
>
> Cheers, Andreas
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: lustre-discuss <lustre-discuss-bounces at lists.lustre.org> On
> Behalf Of Philippe Weill
> > Sent: Saturday, April 28, 2018 1:14 AM
> > To: lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> > Subject: Re: [lustre-discuss] Do I need Lustre?
> >
> >
> >
> > Le 27/04/2018 à 19:07, Thackeray, Neil L a écrit :
> >> 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.
> >>
> >
> > hello
> >
> > you didn't say anything about filesystem size needed and if you are
> thinking to grow fast we also run a small cluster ( 20 nodes ) but for
> climate data modeling results and satellite atmospheric data analysis we
> are growing at least 300TB per year (2PB now) and it's easier for us to
> grow with lustre
> >
> >
> > --
> > Weill Philippe -  Administrateur Systeme et Reseaux
> > CNRS/UPMC/IPSL   LATMOS (UMR 8190)
> > _______________________________________________
> > lustre-discuss mailing list
> > lustre-discuss at lists.lustre.org
> > http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org
> > _______________________________________________
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> > http://lists.lustre.org/listinfo.cgi/lustre-discuss-lustre.org
>
> Cheers, Andreas
> --
> Andreas Dilger
> Lustre Principal Architect
> Intel Corporation
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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