Dell PowerEdge EL Manual 

March 2013, Version 1.0 Improving NFS Performance on HPC Clusters with Dell Fluid Cache for DAS This Dell technical white paper explains how to improve Network File System I/O performance by using Dell Fluid Cache for Direct Attached Storage in a High Performance Computing Cluster. ...

2 This document is for informational purposes only and may contain typographical errors and technical inaccuracies. The content is provided as is, without express or implied warranties of any kind. © 2013 Dell Inc. All rights reserved. Dell and its affiliates cannot be responsible for e ...

3 Contents Executive Summary ....................................................................................................... 5 1. Introduction ........................................................................................................... 6 1.1. Dell Fluid Cache for D ...

4 Tables Table 1. NFS server and storage hardware configuration ...................................................... 8 Table 2. NFS server software and firmware configuration ..................................................... 9 Table 3. Hardware configuration for DFC ............... ...

5 Executive Summary Most High Performance Computing clusters use some form of a Network File System (NFS) based storage solution for user data. Easy to configure and administer, free with virtually all Linux distributions, and well-tested and reliable, NFS has many advantages. Use of nea ...

6 1. Introduction A Network File System (NFS) based storage solution is a popular choice for High Performance Computing Clusters (HPC). Most HPC clusters use some form of NFS irrespective of the size of the cluster. NFS is simple to configure and administer, free with virtually all Linux ...

7 sections provide details on each of these components as well as information on tuning and monitoring the solution. 2.1. NFS storage solution (baseline) The baseline in this study is an NFS configuration. One PowerEdge R720 is used as the NFS server. PowerVault™ MD1200 storage arrays ...

8 NFS server Figure 2. NFS server and storage hardware configuration Table 1. Server configuration NFS SERVER PowerEdge R720 PROCESSORS Dual Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2680 @ 2.70 GHz MEMORY 128 GB. 16 * 8 GB 1600MT/s RDIMMs INTERNAL DISKS 5 * 300 GB 15 K SAS disks Two drives configured in ...

9 NFS server software and firmware configuration Table 2. Software OPERATING SYSTEM Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 6.3z KERNEL VERSION 2.6.32-279.14.1.el6.x86_64 FILE SYSTEM Red Hat Scalable File System (XFS) 3.1.1-7 SYSTEMS MANAGEMENT Dell OpenManage Server Administrator 7.1.2 Firmware ...

10 Hardware configuration for DFC Table 3. Server configuration NFS SERVER PowerEdge R720 CACHE POOL Two 350GB Dell PowerEdge Express Flash PCIe SSD SSD CONTROLLER Internal (slot 4) Rest of the configuration is the same as baseline, as described in Table 1 Storage configuration Same as b ...