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Dell Technologies performed the tests on the solution configuration described in Table 1. The following table details the client test bed that we used to provide the I/O workload.
Component | Specification |
Operating system | Red Hat Enterprise Linux release 8.4 (Ootpa) |
Kernel version | 4.18.0-305.el8.x86_64 |
Servers | 16× Dell EMC PowerEdge C6420 |
InfiniBand Adapter | 1× ConnectX-6 100Gb/s HDR100 adapter card with firmware version 20.31.2006 |
NVIDIA Mellanox OFED version | 5.4-1.0.3.0 |
BeeGFS | 7.3.0 |
The performance analysis focused on the following two key performance characteristics:
The goal was a broad but accurate overview of the capabilities of the solution using the InfiniBand HDR interconnect. Dell Technologies used IOzone benchmarks for performance characterization. IOzone uses an N-to-N file-access method. N-to-N load was tested, where every thread of the benchmark (N clients) writes to a different file (N files) on the storage system. For examples of the commands that were used to run these benchmarks, see Appendix A.
Dell Technologies ran each set of tests on a range of clients to test the scalability of the solution. The number of simultaneous physical clients involved in each test ranged from a single client to sixteen clients. The number of threads per node corresponds to the number of physical compute nodes, up to sixteen. The total number of threads above sixteen were simulated by increasing the number of threads per client across all clients. For instance, for 128 threads, each of the 16 clients ran eight threads.
To prevent inflated results due to caching effects, Dell Technologies ran the tests with a cold cache. Before each test started, the BeeGFS file system under test was remounted. A sync was performed, and the kernel was instructed to drop caches on all the clients and BeeGFS servers (MDS and SS) with the following commands:
sync && echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
In measuring the solution performance, Dell Technologies performed all tests with similar initial conditions. The file system was configured to be fully functional, and the targets tested were emptied of files and directories before each test.