Home > Workload Solutions > High Performance Computing > White Papers > HPC Software-Defined Storage with PixStor > Benchmarks selected and test beds
To characterize the different components of the PixStor storage solution, we used the hardware specified in the last column of Table 1, including the optional high-demand metadata module. In order to assess the solution performance, the following benchmarks were selected:
For all benchmarks listed above, the test bed had the clients as described in the Table 2 below, except for testing the gateway nodes. Since the number of compute nodes available for testing was only 16, when a higher number of threads was required, those threads were equally distributed on the compute nodes (i.e. 32 threads = 2 threads per node, 64 threads = 4 threads per node, 128 threads = 8 threads per node, 256 threads =16 threads per node, 512 threads = 32 threads per node, 1024 threads = 64 threads per node). The intention was to simulate a higher number of concurrent clients with the limited number of compute nodes. Since the benchmarks support a high number of threads, a maximum value up to 512 was used based on the number of cores available on the client nodes. Using more threads than cores may cause excessive context switching and other related side effects that affect performance results.
The software versions listed Table 2 were used on the client nodes.
Element |
Configuration |
Number of client nodes |
16 |
Client node |
C6420 |
Processors per client node |
Eight nodes with 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6230 20 Cores @ 2.1GHz Eight nodes with 2 x Intel Xeon Gold 6148 20 Cores @ 2.40GHz |
Memory per client node |
Eight nodes (6230) with 12 x 16GiB 2933 MT/s RDIMMs Eight nodes (6148) with 12 x 16GiB 2666 MT/s RDIMMs |
BIOS |
2.8.2 |
Operating system |
CentOS 7.9 |
OS kernel |
3.10.0-1160.el7.x86_64 |
PixStor software |
6.0.0.0 |
Spectrum Scale (GPFS) |
5.1.1-2 |
OFED version |
MLNX_OFED_LINUX-5.4-1.0.3.0 |
CX6 FW |
Eight nodes (CPU 6230) with Mellanox CX6 single port: 20.31.1014 Eight nodes (CPU 6148) with Dell OEM CX6 single port: 20.28.4512 |