Home > Workload Solutions > High Performance Computing > White Papers > Dell Validated Design for Health Care and Life Sciences with Dell PowerEdge C6520 and XE8545 > Storage
Dell offers a wide range of general purposes and HPC storage solutions. For a general overview of the Dell HPC solution portfolio, go to www.dell.com. There are typically three tiers of storage for HPC: scratch storage, operational storage, and archival storage, which differ in terms of size, performance, and persistence.
For customers who want a shared high-performance parallel file system, the Dell Validated Design for BeeGFS Storage solution shown in Figure 1 is appropriate. This solution can scale up to multiple petabytes of storage.
Scratch storage tends to persist for the entire duration of a single data analysis. It may be used to hold temporary data which is unable to reside in the compute system’s main memory due to insufficient physical memory capacity. HPC applications may be considered “I/O bound” if access to storage impedes the progress of the data analysis. For these HPC workloads, typically the most cost-effective solution is to provide sufficient direct-attached local storage on the compute nodes. For situations where the application requires a shared file system across the compute cluster, a high-performance shared file system is better suited than relying on local direct-attached storage. See Figure 2. Typically, using direct-attached local storage offers the best overall price and performance and is considered the best practice for most NGS data analysis. For this reason, the recommended configurations include local storage with appropriate performance and capacity for a wide range of production workloads. If anticipated workload requirements exceed the performance and capacity provided by the recommended local storage configurations, care should be taken to size scratch storage appropriately based on the workload.
For this study, high capacity BeeGFS solution is used for home and work directories whereas high-performance BeeGFS solution servers as scratch storage.