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In high-performance computing (HPC), all its different components must be balanced for optimal performance and to avoid bottlenecks. Technological evolution of compute nodes made storage a bottleneck that is normally avoided using Parallel File Systems (PFS) that can scale out to meet new bigger demands. Recent rapid advances in storage technologies like Non-Volatile Memory Express (NVMe) SSDs, make available better and faster options to PFS storage systems.
A well-balanced storage system is required to achieve optimal performance. Its components such as back-end arrays, storage controllers, disk drives, IO cards, network adapters, and switches must be able to provide similar bandwidth and distribute the load among the processors and memory of the servers they use. The PFS and supporting software must be able to balance the load on the different storage system components distributing data among them, monitoring performance along with the health of the components, and provide administration tools to manage the solution efficiently.
The Dell Validated Design for HPC pixstor Storage is a highly available (HA) solution that is based on Dell PowerEdge 15G servers and Dell PowerVault ME4084 storage arrays arranged in storage modules. Each storage module can scale up its capacity to 10.74 PiB of formatted and available storage (raw capacity 12,096 TB). The solution can scale out to customer requirements by adding more of those modules up to the required capacity and performance. For situations that require high throughput or metadata demands, an NVMe tier can scale out performance by adding pairs of HA nodes with NVMe devices using replication among the server pairs.
pixstor storage uses the well-established General Parallel File System (GPFS), now known as Spectrum Scale, with a full range of enterprise features that can be geo-distributed, components that simplify administration, additional advanced search capabilities, extensive connectivity using enterprise protocols, and access to other storage devices both on and off premises using cloud protocols and other enterprise protocols. This storage solution is fully supported (hardware and software) with deployment services available and offers single namespace, multi-tiered, easy-to-use, high throughput, among other features.
This document describes the architecture, general design guidelines, and performance of the HPC pixstor storage solution for large transfers Sequential, small transfers Random IO, and Metadata operations workloads.
Note: The contents of this document are valid for the described software and hardware versions. For information about updated configurations for newer software and hardware versions, contact your Dell Technologies sales representative.
This document is primarily intended for solution architects and administrators who plan to use or are using HPC clusters, and require high-performance storage that keeps up with modern processing power. This document is not a detailed configuration guide but provides configuration best practices. It assumes that the readers understand the basic concepts of storage performance benchmarking.